About Food Waste Management Information System for Hotels (FW4H) project
Addressing Food Waste in the Hospitality Sector: The FW4H Project
According to the EU Commission around 88 million tonnes of food waste are generated annually with associated costs estimated at 143 billion euros. In the Food Service (Accommodation and food and beverage service activities) sector around 10.5 million tonnes of food waste are generated annually. In September 2015, the EU countries have adopted and committed to meeting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3, which targets to halve per capita food waste at the retail and consumer level by 2030 and reduce food losses along the food production and supply chains.
Tackling food waste requires working together with all key players from public and private sectors in order to better identify, measure, understand and find solutions to deal with food waste. Food waste management in the hospitality sector is an issue, especially for hotels. The problem is even more crucial in countries that economically invest and depend on tourism such as Cyprus and Greece, since hotels incur substantial economic losses and produce a large environmental footprint due to food waste.
The Food Waste Management Information System for Hotels (FW4H) is a project funded by the Research and Innovation Foundation, ‘The Research and Innovation Foundation Programmes’, ‘for research, technological development and innovation’ (RESTART 2016 – 2020, PRE_SEED/1221/0165) with a total duration of 18 month, that aims to tackle the problem of food waste management in the Hotel sector, by enabling hotel chefs, managers, and owners to exploit the value of data.
The consortium of the project consists of five partners
Panaline Ltd
Frederick Research Center
Atlantica Aqua Blue Hotel
GrantXpert Consulting Ltd
Cyprus Chefs Association
Our Technical Skills & Expertise
The technical objective of the project is to build the hardware system that consists of a digital scale with a camera attached, which interfaces to the micro-controller board, employ machine learning technologies (ML) based on the Tensorflow Lite framework for model training and food detection, and designing and developing a web platform that offers food waste management information services, which enable the hotels’ personnel to auto-measure, report and analyse food waste for hotels.
Our Scientific Approach to Hotel Food Waste Management
The scientific objective of the project is two-fold:
-Follow an agile co-design and co-creation approach with the expert partners involved in the project, mainly the Cyprus Chefs Association (C.C.A.) and the Atlantica Aqua Blue Hotel, which will provide input and feedback throughout all stages of the project, from design to development of a web platform that provides value to our customers.
-Pilot our system and platform at a real hotel environment in Cyprus (i.e., Atlantica Aqua Blue) to measure food disposal at Stage 4 of the food waste management hotspots (i.e., only damaged food, overproduced – see Figure 1), and exploit the data to quantify and statistically analyse, report and visualise the impact towards the environment and the financial losses incurred.