In this week's episode, Gil speaks with Matt Rogers, the founder and CEO of Mill, a startup revolutionizing how we tackle food waste. They delve into the inspiration behind Mill, discussing how the idea came about and the parallels to Matt's previous work as the co-founder of Nest, the company behind the iconic learning thermostat and other smart home products. Matt discusses the functionality of Mill's kitchen bin, which transforms food scraps into nutrient-rich animal feed, and how the company is bringing this groundbreaking product to the market. He explains the emissions profile of Mill's appliance and the positive impact it can have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Also, Matt shares his insights on the crucial role of technology and innovation in driving sustainable solutions.
In this week's episode, Gil speaks with Matt Rogers, the founder and CEO of Mill, a startup revolutionizing how we tackle food waste. They delve into the inspiration behind Mill, discussing how the idea came about and the parallels to Matt's previous work as the co-founder of Nest, the company behind the iconic learning thermostat and other smart home products. Matt discusses the functionality of Mill's kitchen bin, which transforms food scraps into nutrient-rich animal feed, and how the company is bringing this groundbreaking product to the market. He explains the emissions profile of Mill's appliance and the positive impact it can have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Also, Matt shares his insights on the crucial role of technology and innovation in driving sustainable solutions.
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The episode originally aired on June 15, 2023.
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Matt Rogers: Every city and town in the country has waste services. For those 95% of cities that don't have food waste collection and even for the 5% that do, could we help provide that service to those cities at scale? That's the long-term goal. That's how you drive systems change. You make it for everybody.
Gil: This week on Climate Positive, we have a fascinating conversation with Matt Rogers, the founder and CEO of Mill, a startup that is revolutionizing how we tackle food waste and showing how we can take meaningful climate action, right from our kitchens
In discussion with Matt, we explored the inspiration behind Mill and its dove into the many features of their incredible new food-shrinking, de-stinking kitchen bin that transforms food scraps into nutrient-rich animal feed,
Matt shares a number of intriguing insights throughout our chat, drawing parallels between Mill and his previous work as the co-founder of Nest, the company responsible for the iconic learning thermostat and other innovative smart home products.
Throughout our conversation, Matt emphasizes the vital role of technology and innovation in driving climate positive solutions.
I’ve been a huge fan of Matt’s work at Nest for many years and was delighted to talk with him about his exciting new venture. With that, here’s my lively conversation with Matt.
Gil: Matt, welcome to Climate Positive.
Matt: Great to be here.
Gil: There's so much I want to get into with you today but maybe let's just start with the really inspiring story about Mill at a high level and the incredible problem of food waste that you're solving.
Matt: Stepping back a little bit, like modern society throws out a lot. Think about the biggest products of humanity, number one I think is concrete. I think number two is garbage. That's astonishing. It shouldn't be that way. No one likes waste but we've come to take it for granted that there's really no other way. I started Mill with a good friend, Harry Tannenbaum, a couple of years ago in the early days of the pandemic to end waste, starting with food.
Gil: Why food? I think you cited a pretty disturbing stat. Could you share?
Matt: Gosh, there's so many. One, we throw out about 40% of the food we grow. That's like every time you go grocery shopping, you have bought five bags and you leave two in the parking lot every single time. An astonishing amount of food waste. You could think like "Oh, that must happen in grocery stores and restaurants." It does. Actually, about half of it comes from us at home.
One, we shouldn't continue to waste food. That's a big part of it. Two, this is even worse. We've managed to take something that's amazing food that we love and turn it into poison. When food goes to landfill, this doesn't degrade and turn into dirt. It actually degrades anaerobically and releases methane, which is like 80x worse than CO2 over 20 [unintelligible 00:01:39]. It's really bad. Look, we've managed to take food, which is awesome and turn it into poison gas.
Gil: Enter Mill and I want to get into the kitchen bin but I'd be remiss-- I first learnt your name. I was in the Bay Area around '9 through '13, working in clean tech. Nest was at the time it's still, was the ultimate success story. I really applaud what you did there. Taking something deeply important and largely unsexy, for lack of a better word, energy efficiency and smart thermostats created a whole category.
You used principles of design and usability and ease of use. I really don't see that much in the climate tech, sustainability space. Can you tell us how you went from the Nest experience, which was so transformative and how you're applying that to Mill? What are the lessons learned so far in the journey?
Matt: There's a lot of parallels and that's actually why we started the [unintelligible 00:02:47]. You look at these aspects of society that we take for granted, that we live with every day and we don't really think much about. That was the early days of Nest. We had this aha moment of these white plastic boxes on our walls controlling half of our home's energy. It's like, doesn't make any sense.
Don't really think much about it until you realize like, "Oh my gosh how much am I wasting every month? How much monthly energy am I spending? How much money am I wasting and could I be more comfortable?" Waste feels very similar. We have these daily chores where we throw icky stuff in bags and they fill up and we haul bags to the curb, or we put them in a garbage chute every day and we don't think much about it.
We don't like it. It's not one of those chores that we love to do like gardening, come to take it for granted. In first principles, if we were designing a new system, how could we do it differently? That's what we set out to do. We're starting with food for all the reasons we just talked about. If we can make an experience that's freaking awesome that you could bring this home to your kitchen and the family, the kids, everyone's like, "Gosh, this is amazing." Then we can start to drive systems change.
Gil: Totally. I remember that moment. I was so excited but I didn't have a home at the time. I was renting in San Francisco. [unintelligible 00:04:08]. My brother had just gotten a home. "You got to try this. I'm getting you. I want to see how this works." That was still ticking after, I don't know 10+ years. It's so exciting that you're applying that again to the kitchen waste space.
Let's talk about the Mill kitchen bin, the product. Tell us how it turns food waste into animal feed. I imagine that there may be an initial misperception that we're talking about composting here. Could you explain that this is not composting and what it is and how it works?
Matt: Yes. What we do is we built the full loop. When we started the company, I don't think we were that ambitious. We're like, "Hey let's just make it easier in your kitchen to do composting." What we realized is one, starting at first principles, the most important thing you could do at home is put your food in the right bin and say that's really hard to do. I live in San Francisco. San Francisco is one of the minority of cities about 5% of the US that has a green bin program that takes food waste.
Gil: They got the blue one, the green one for the compost.
Matt: That's right. We have one but we actually didn't use it. I'm kind of embarrassed to say it like, as a climate guy or like, I didn't use my green bin but it was gross. We had fruit flies invading our kitchen. Like we could not get rid of them. I had like this yellow, sticky paper hanging all over the kitchen, trying to get rid of the fruit flies. We've kind of abandoned our countertop pail. We thought like, "How can we make this better? How can we get rid of fruit flies? How can we get rid of rats? How can make this a pleasurable experience? How can we get rid of one of your chores?" We built this bin that takes all the food that you don't eat, meat and dairy included even things that you can't compost and it dries it out.
We do that for a number of reasons. One, when you dry things out, they don't go bad. Think about like astronaut food, stays stable for a really long time. We dry out all that food. What's cool is like food is mostly water. When you dry it out, it gets about 80% size reduced. What that means is our kitchen bin, which is about the same size as the kitchen garbage can, takes weeks to fill up. Yes, like one less chore, you're not taking the trash out every day. Maybe you're taking it out every couple of weeks. Also, by drying it out, it makes it small and light and easy to transport, which means we don't need to drive around diesel garbage trucks to our neighborhoods anymore. You could just put this at your front porch and the mail will come pick it up.
Gil: You call these food grounds? The idea is you ship them and where do they go?
Matt: Yes. You put these boxes out at your front porch, maybe once a month, that's about how long it takes to fill up. The US Postal Service comes to your house, automatically picks it up, our app tells them to come get it and it then get shipped to one of our sites where we process and filter the material. We take out any contaminants that may have been put in by accident. Like if you accidentally put in a plastic straw or a fork, it's not going to break anything, we'll take it out. Then we process the material and test it, bag it up and sell it to farmers to give it to chickens.
Gil: I want to come back to why chickens. First, we're talking tech here. I think every conversation has to include the mention AI in every conversations. Is it a requirement in 2023? The bins uses AI tech to analyze my trash and sort it?
Matt: Not really. We run some basic algorithms to minimize runtime like we don't want to waste energy. We measure how much moisture is in the material and dry it out but we don't require compute and server farms to run our garbage can. That'd be ridiculous.
Gil: Thank you for clearing that up. The one thing, do you get questions from folks who are already composting, I'd say "I'm shipping it," the hardcore enviros, press, myself included that are like, "What are the lifecycle emissions when I ship this off?" and I just want to put this in my bin and I know it goes to my local compost bin if I'm in a crunchy place that has that service?
Matt: Yes.
Gil: How do you address the emissions question?
Matt: The first order is that food in landfill is really bad. 95% of our food waste is going to landfills or incineration. It's not getting composted. That's kind of the highest-order bit we need to solve. We built this new system to make food recycling much more accessible. Most cities don't have compost programs, only about five 5% of US does. If you do have a compost program like we do in San Francisco, we think it's still helpful. I get it like, no one likes fruit flies or rats, taking out these, everyone knows the bags I am talking about, like these, like green film bags that always leak. Like they're designed to leak. It's like, it'd be nice to get rid of those things. That stuff is helpful.
Gil: Tell me more about the experience with the product itself. What's the energy use? I think I read, it's plugged in, it's Wi-Fi. It's connected to the app but we're talking relatively low energy use to dry out these food scraps. What's it comparable to?
Matt: That's right. It's about a kilowatt hour a day. That's less than your dishwasher runs every night. If you think about the amount of energy we spend today, handling waste, those diesel trucks that drive through our neighborhoods are not emissions-free. We're actually shipping our waste today. You don't think about it as shipping because it's not like a postal carrier picks it up. We're shipping it in garbage trucks which actually is worse.
Gil: How does the membership model work, you don't just buy the bin, right?. It's a total product. What's the pricing on this?
Matt: Yes. We're building the full loop. This is not just an appliance that goes in your kitchen. What else can you do with the stuff and again, most households don't have access to an output pathway for food. We built the full loop, the end-to-end from the bin in your kitchen all the way to the farm, and it costs about a dollar a day. It's a dollar a day for no more stinky trash, for one less chore. It's a pretty great experience. It's one of those things that once you start using it, there's really no going back.
Gil: Well, tell me about what has surprised you from the feedback from early customers? And I think you have young kids too, so I'm going to put myself on the wait-list . What's the reaction from your own kids early on?
Matt: My kids love it. They call it Oscar. Like Oscar the Grouch in Sesame Street. It's really cute. They put little magnets on the bin.
Gil: Awesome.
Matt: Our refrigerator doesn't take magnets. I don't know why refrigerators don't have those anymore, but the Mill bin takes magnets so they put little magnets on it and they instinctually get it. Kids know that food is great and food is valuable. We talk about it like when the food goes in the Mill bin, it's going back to the farm to feed chickens.
Gil: Wonderful.
Matt: It's instinctually good. It actually reminds me of when I was growing up in the '80s and '90s being taught about recycling and in hindsight, some of that was some greenwashing that we didn't even know at the time, but kids get this stuff.
Gil: What about other consumer feedback? It's a direct-to-consumer model now I understand, but I wanted to ask you I assume you're thinking about other sales channels. One of the things I thought you did brilliantly at Nest was, it's showing up in my Home Depot. You're thinking mirroring that, getting the sustainability products in the big box or is the direct consumer for a while?
Matt: We're starting direct-to-consumer because we want to build a relationship with people and we want to build the brand and we want to learn. Inevitably waste is something that cities provide the residents. Every city and town in the country has waste services and some is run by the city itself. Some is third party services. For those 95% of cities that don't have food waste collection and even for the 5% that do, could we help provide that service to those cities at scale? That's obviously not something you could do on day one as a startup, but that's the long-term goal. That's how you drive systems change. You make it for everybody.
Gil: On that front, I talked to my colleague here and said, "Let's get this for our office." We've got the composting here. We're always looking at ways as a corporation to reduce our Scope 3 emissions. I imagine the B2B channel is potentially another one for you for companies to offer this to their employees. Great perk, doing good, fun. Then also for those companies that are reporting their emissions they can reduce their Scope 3, right? I'm sure that's--
Matt: That's right. We've actually already had a few companies sign up to provide Mill memberships for their employees as an employee benefit.
Gil: That's great.
Matt: We've got a few partnerships with cities already signed and we had our first municipal pilot launched in Tacoma, Washington a few months ago and we got a couple more coming. We got a lot of different pathways to get to market, but going direct to consumer is a really good way to demonstrate that behavior change, that we could change what happens in your kitchen. You've sliced up the carrots and you've got that carrot top now, where is it going? We've made it really easy to do that first step. It's not a last mile problem. It's a first meter problem.
If we can make that first meter really, really easy, then everything else after that becomes easier. Once stuff gets mixed together, it's really hard to get the value out. I've been learning about this over the last couple years. Some cities take all their trash, all their co-mingled trash and they try to extract the food and organic matter out once it's a mixed bag of everything. It's really hard. It's really gross.
Gil: This is just getting started. It was an official launch earlier this year. People can wait-list to sign up. You're scaling fast. You've done this before. What does the trajectory look like just this year?
Matt: Actually the mirrors to the early Nest days are really clear for me. We launched a few months ago and we've started shipping to customers and we've got our first couple of hundred customers already using the experience and we're ramping production. I think we're already sold out for the year. Demand has been pretty good. People have been signing up and putting reservations in. I think we're pretty much sold out for the year. If folks are interested, the sooner you sign up the better because it's going to be a while. The sooner we know, the more we can ramp production.
Chad: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Gil: We were talking before we started recording that someone in your marketing department has done a great job on the Instagram organic and TikTok paid strategy. This is tailor-made for social media which wasn't quite where it is back in your Nest day. I was talking to the Nest co-founder. He is doing Mill. He said, "Oh yes, I know that. I saw their Instagram stuff."
Matt: Hilarious. Look, trash is funny.
Gil: It is. The pun potentials. You're having fun in the copywriting department, I imagine, right? With all those--
Matt: That's right. There are so many good jokes. Yes. We go dumpster diving every day in this office. It is like and actually, and literally, we do. There's just rife with good puns and good jokes.
Gil: My favorite, I heard you say you're the first company to go-- Everyone's talking about farm-to-table, but you're the first-
Matt: Table-to-farm, right?
Gil: -table-to-farm. Yes. I think that's a winner.
Matt: Yes.
Gil: Matt, what should have I asked you that I didn't already? Before we turn to our hot seat, lightning round to wrap it up.
Matt: See, you mentioned about the environmental community. I think it's worth touching on that a little.
Gil: Yes.
Matt: This was a good lesson learned from my Nest days, but also running my own family office and doing philanthropy in climate and climate investing. It's really important to bring everyone along and get their feedback on this journey. Even before we launched, our very small team spent a lot of time with the big and parallel [unintelligible 00:16:02] nonprofits like EDF and NRDC and the World Wildlife Fund and ReFED to learn of what's worked well, what's not worked well, what they're seeing with communities, which communities we should talk to. Actually, it was a really effective way for us to learn before we launched. Once you launch, you're going to get feedback.
We were able to shape our narrative and our plans based on environmental input. When we launched the company, we also launched our LCA, which is something I did not do at Nest on day one, and I probably should have, but we didn't even know what that was back then. We did a full scoping LCA that's peer reviewed to show what the environmental impact of our process is, all the way from manufacturing, shipping, the energy used at home, the moving the food grounds around, the processing them to make sure that what we're doing is doing the right thing for the planet, too. Even with all the kilowatt hour of energy per day and the shipping of the grounds, we still save about a half a ton of emissions per household per year.
Gil: Yes, I was astounded by that. That just makes this a complete no-brainer and should have the wide embrace of the environmental community. It was quite shrewd because if you think about it, for the true Greens, right? I grew up in Portland, Oregon, so I've been composting my whole life. You're coming at the composting community potentially, if you haven't pre-engaged them, right? They shouldn't feel it that way but change is hard. Right? You've got a fancy tech device and maybe there's some skepticism amongst the initial early adopters, but what I think is so cool about Mill was true about Nest is not just early adopters, but that sort of fast followers. Right? You're trying to mainstream this stuff, and mainstream requires-
Matt: Exactly, that's right.
Gil: -a whole different paradigm in terms of user experience, marketing, design, fun. I applaud you. That very interesting, anecdote. Thank you for sharing.
Matt: Yes. We want this to be for everyone, and it took Nest a while to move from a premium early adopter product to a product for everyone. That probably took 5+ years. We're trying to learn how to do that quick.
Gil: Just the US, to start?
Matt: Just the US to start, albeit food waste is a problem globally.
Gil: Indeed.
Matt: Yes, other than a few countries in Europe and South Korea and Japan, most food waste ends up in the trash around the planet.
Gil: You're creating a category here. Right? There's not a comparable smart-- You don't have peers yet. Is that fair to say?
Matt: Not really. There are companies that build dehydrators for your house.
Gil: Okay.
Matt: There's a bunch of South Korean companies that make these little countertop bins that take the water out of food. There's a couple of companies that claim they make home composters. I haven't seen anyone building the full loop. I think that's the innovation and that's what I learned at Apple. That's what we did at Nest. It's not enough just to build the widget. That doesn't solve the problem. That's not a complete product. We make hundreds of pounds of food waste per year, per household. Where is it all going to go? Not everybody has a big garden. If you live in a high rise in Manhattan, what are you going to do with hundreds of pounds of food waste? It's got to go somewhere.
Gil: So true. All right, let's bring it home with the hot seat, rapid fire. Just say the first thing that comes to your mind. There are no wrong answers. These are mostly fill in the blank.
Matt: This is fun.
Gil: The hardest decision I ever made is?
Matt: Selling Nest to Google.
Gil: Matt, why was that hard? There was a few b's on that number, but I'm kidding.
Matt: Yes, your [unintelligible 00:19:43] control is a big deal.
Gil: Sure. This is was your baby.
Matt: That's right. It's one of those fork-in-the-road conversations in life, where like, "Have you made the right decision and will the mission be carried forward?" It's something I think about a lot.
Gil: Another fill-in-the-blank. One thing I've changed my mind on is?
Matt: That people can change. One of my initial learnings at Apple is like that people don't change. You have to build products that fit into people's lives. I think one of the evolutions that I've learned in the iPhone days and through the Nest journey is actually if you make things awesome, if you make things really easy, actually, people can change and they can learn. These daily habits that we have, we're not stuck. We can get better. I think about the climate crisis as very emblematic of this. Yes, government is going to drive a lot of change, but actually, we're going to change too and it's going to be better.
Gil: That's right, so true. When I need to recharge, I-?
Matt: I go for a bike ride. It's one of the beautiful things about living in Northern California is we could get outside and in five minutes you're in a beautiful wilderness on a mountain somewhere.
Gil: I Imagine you'd like the Marin Headlands, that's your spot.
Matt: A 100%. Actually, as an entrepreneur, it is so important to have this balance in life that we're like, you could be in good physical shape because if you're not in good physical shape, it's really hard to be good mental shape and be a good leader.
Gil: So true. Let's stay on that theme. You've been in the climate solutions, entrepreneur, investor space, so can I say 20+ years now. Is that?
Matt: Almost At least 15. Wow. Yes.
Gil: This latest wave of climate tech very encouraging, very exciting. What historical advice, what's the advice that you most often give to other climate tech founders right now in '23 based on where we are and in your learnings?
Matt: Well, the work that we are doing is critical. The economy has to decarbonize. It's not like this is an optional activity. We have to do this. If you have that point of view of, this is inevitable and we have to do it and there are lots of bumps on the road and there are a lot of waves in the ocean along the way. Look this is a fairly choppy period, but look, this period will pass. Building a business that has positive societal change and can grow to scale is what we got to do. There are plenty of investors out there that are interested in those systemic change companies.
Gil: A lot more in '23 than when you were out just 10 years ago.
Matt: 100%. Oh my gosh. When Tony and I were raising money for Nest in 2010, 2011, there were no climate investors. It was basically like the Kleiner Perkins of the world and not really much else.
Gil: Yes. I remember.
Matt: Times have changed a lot. Thinking about climate as a broad category, not just renewable energy, is also a transition that's happened. You're working on waste.
Gil: Yes. We're talking about all the slices of emissions, encouraging so--
Matt: Yes, food and ag space, transportation, there's whole categories of climate investor that did not exist 10 years ago.
Gil: Okay, two final ones. Fill in the blank. I want my kids to know?
Matt: Oh that, what their dad is doing is impactful. Actually, I talk to them about this a lot. Life is short and you've got to really make a lot of what you're doing and leave the world in a better place. I grew up in a Jewish household and we talk about like Tikkun Olam. About saving and healing the world. My kids definitely, albeit are young, they totally get this too.
Gil: Final question we ask all our guests. To me climate positive means?
Matt: That we can do this. Look there are some schools of, it's too late and we're doomed. I don't come from that school. I think just being a part of this journey for the last decade-plus watching what's happened in renewables, with EVs. We can drive this change and it can be better than how things used to be. If you listen to some like talk radio, you'll get the feeling, "Oh, they're going to take away your stoves. You can't fly to see your family anymore." That's not true. This climate transition is going to be better. We could live better lives that are more sustainable and we're going to build some really big businesses while we do it.
Gil: Well said Matt, it was really a pleasure to talk with you. I just applaud [unintelligible 00:24:22] big fan of all that you're doing and I encourage our listeners to sign up on the wait-list and we'll put that in the show notes and I will be doing that as well. I might ask some questions on how we can do that as a business as well because I think that channel there'll be some interest there from other businesses.
Matt: Absolute pleasure. This is a lot of fun and looking forward to stay in touch.
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I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.