Impact start-up SPRK combats food waste with AI

Alexander Piutti

Founder Alexander Piutti wants to prevent food surpluses with the technology from SPRK.

(Photo: SPRK)

Dusseldorf No matter when you walk through the supermarkets: Both grilled meat for a barbecue and potatoes for a stew are always available in abundance. But not everything is always bought with the same frequency. When it rains, less grilled meat is sold over the counter, when there are new nutritional trends, potato sales can decline.

Less is therefore not produced immediately. What is left then ends up in the trash. “But the problem does not start with the disposal of the excess food,” says Alexander Piutti, founder and head of the Berlin start-up SPRK.global, “but the real problem is massive overproduction along the supply chain.”

Piutti has built a business model against this: a technology that uses artificial intelligence to record when and where along the food industry’s supply chain too much is being produced and where the surplus vegetables, fruit and other food can be redistributed.

The goal of the start-up is therefore to minimize food waste and enable a better distribution of resources. In fact, food waste is an ongoing problem. A recently published report by WWF shows: 40 percent of the food produced annually worldwide is thrown away because it is produced in excess.

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The Green Start-up Monitor 2021 from the Association of German Start-ups shows, however, that the proportion of start-ups with a climate-friendly or environmentally friendly business model has increased by 30 percent. Of the more than 1,700 start-ups analyzed, 509 were “green” companies and most frequently represented in both IT and the food and beverage industry. “With their solutions, they are driving a sustainable structural change in these sectors that are so important for the socio-ecological transformation,” the initiators write.

SPRK fruit spread

The start-up also uses the surplus fruit that comes from suppliers to the industry via SPRK to produce its own goods.

(Photo: SPRK)

So does SPRK. The company works with food retailers, logisticians, tropical fruit importers and agricultural producers. On the customer side, it cooperates with hospitals, the SOS Children’s Village, large caterers such as Eurest, and the processing industry. “We enter all the data we get into our platform, which trains our algorithm and the artificial intelligence recognizes more and more patterns,” Piutti explains the technology. “In this way we can predict surpluses and also distribute food better.”

Impact investors participated with a seven-figure sum

The company, which was founded in 2017 and has around 27 employees, has also entered into an important partnership for this purpose: SPRK cooperates with Lufthansa Industry Solutions (LIHND), a subsidiary of Lufthansa, in order to efficiently connect producers and customers.

The IT company should let the systems of producers and buyers correspond for SPRK. If, for example, a wholesaler can no longer sell his bananas, he books them in the system and records what they look like, where they come from or how old they are. At the same time, a customer like the Charité in Berlin is looking for bananas for the hospital kitchen and enters this into its system. “The system can recommend potential customers on the basis of products or vice versa,” explains Susan Wegner, Vice President Artificial Intelligence & Data Analysis at LHIND.

In a seed financing almost a year ago, SPRK was able to collect a seven-digit amount. Most of the participation came from impact investors, as founder Piutti reveals. Among them were the Toniebox founders Marcus Stahl and Patric Fassbender, the Haas Family Office in Austria, soccer player Mario Götze and film producer Fahri Yardim.

“Revenue comes from selling and mediating the surplus food,” says Piutti. The majority of customers are regular buyers who buy goods from SPRK on a weekly basis. In addition, all users of the SPRK platform would also have to pay license fees.

The company Too Good To Go, for example, works similarly to SPRK, and its app can be used to collect surplus goods from shops and restaurants. Too Good To Go is also a partner of SPRK. The start-up Choco also offers an app for food orders for large kitchens. As of this year, it’s valued at $ 600 million.

More: With these ideas, companies are turning waste avoidance into business

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