Unilever’s Brand Hellmann’s Cuts Waste and Personalizes Meal Time With AI Tool
Food brand Hellmann’s, owned by Unilever, is tackling food waste with a new AI-powered tool.
“Meal Reveal,” a new artificial intelligence-powered experience, allows consumers to scan their fridge for ingredients that can then be combined in recommended recipes. The tool taps AI to first identify the ingredients and then again to match those ingredients to a recipe.
Created in partnership with Google Cloud, “Meal Reveal” is accessible via a QR code on the tool’s website and allows users to upload videos or pictures of items in their fridge to get started.
"Food waste is an unintended consequence of our busy lives, where we look in the fridge after a long day and see disparate ingredients but nothing to eat,” said Christina Bauer-Plank, Hellmann’s Global VP, in a statement. “We saw an opportunity here to create a straightforward, easy-to-use tool.”
According to Feeding America, in the U.S., people waste 80 million tons of food every year, equal to 149 billion meals and $444 billion worth of food. Unilever said the technology was created to tackle “fridge blindness,” a contributor to food waste that describes households seeing a refrigerator full of food but being unable to think of meals to make.
This isn’t the company’s first endeavor in sustainability- and efficiency-minded AI. Last year, Unilever launched an e-commerce app for its retail partners that used AI-powered refrigerators to monitor stock levels, make electronic payments, and view discounts and special offers. Also, the company retrofitted 50,000 of its freezers with image capture and AI technology to ramp up inventory streamlining initiatives.
Hellmann’s is one of Unilever’s five primary business units, Nutrition, now overseen by president Heiko Schipper, a previous Nestlé veteran. Other brands in this segment include Knorr, Red Label, Horlicks, Unox, Bango, and Maille.
