Lumitics raises seed funding to track the food wasted by Singapore’s F&B outlets and restaurants

Lumitics, a food waste technology startup based out of Singapore, has received US$557,000 in an oversubscribed seed funding round, co-led by the business angel and hospitality industry veteran Franck Courmont and ReadyVentures.

Other participating investors include Singapore-based Startup-O and Louise Daley, Deputy CEO of Accor Hotels Asia Pacific. Daley invested in his personal capacity.

With this, Lumitics’s (previously known as Good For Food) total investment raised to date has exceeded US$743,000.

The startup said it will use the fresh investments for further product development, expand its market share in Singapore, and bring its solution to regional markets with an aim to empower the hospitality and F&B industries to reduce their food waste.

As part of the deal, both Franck Courmont and Nicholas Cocks from ReadyVentures will join Lumitics’s Board.

Lumitics has previously received grants from Temasek Foundation Ecosperity and Enterprise Singapore.

Also Read: Foodtech in Singapore through the eyes of startups

The company was started in 2019 by Rayner Loi and Keshav Sivakumar, both young undergraduates who met during an accelerator programme. Lumitics offers Insight, a smart food waste tracker that leverages on sensors and their proprietary image recognition technology to weigh and identify what restaurants and kitchens throw away.

Insight integrates with any standard rubbish bin used in kitchens to measure, track, and identify food waste. Insight then generates essential data that enables F&B businesses to reduce their food waste, save costs, and improve their environmental footprints.

To use the product, the staff simply empty unconsumed food into Insight, whose sensors and image recognition technology identify the food while a measuring scale weighs the amount discarded.

This data is automatically sent to a cloud dashboard that provides customers with actionable insights that are typically used in buffet restaurants to reduce the amount of unconsumed food from the buffet line.

For kitchen production, Insight may inform the chef of the comparison of discarded food items with the industry average so the chef may come up with a better plan on buffet production and display. The chef is enabled to examine how certain food items should be reduced or possibly source from a new supplier to reduce the amount trashed for the unfresh conditions.

Also Read: 9 Asia-based foodtech startups that will satiate your culinary desires

Every year, some 810,000 tonnes of food are reportedly wasted in Singapore alone. Hotel buffets are one of the major sources of excessive food waste, with hotel kitchens throwing away about 25 per cent of all food that passes through them.

With Singapore’s Ministry of Environment and Water Resources has designated 2019 as the Year Towards Zero Waste, Lumitics’ Insight would be a part of the sustainable future the country tries to achieve.

The company is supported by NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of the National University of Singapore, and receives incubation support at BLOCK71 Singapore.
–

Picture Credit: Lumitics

The post Lumitics raises seed funding to track the food wasted by Singapore’s F&B outlets and restaurants appeared first on e27.