Parasol Island – Integrated Digital Studio

A German start-up is helping
canteens avoid overproduction.

Consumption in large gastronomic enterprises such as company canteens or refectories is so tricky to calculate that in this sphere alone, an estimated 1.9 million tons of food are destroyed in Germany every year. Depending on how you crunch the numbers, this tots up to between 15–20% of the country’s total food waste. The founders of Delicious Data came across the problem themselves, as students in their canteen.

Jakob Breuninger and Valentin Belser responded by developing an algorithm enabling operators to more precisely plan consumption at large companies. Provided as a service, the software runs on all common devices. The programme uses artificial intelligence to combine historical factory data with external factors in order to forecast sales figures. This should save tens of thousands of euros a day in a canteen for 3,000 employees. Among the first 30 test customers of the start-up based in Garching, near Munich, is the Studentenwerk Frankfurt am Main, which operates 32 canteens and cafés in the Rhine-Main area.