By Rebecca Gibian

Philly resident Matt Wampler and his partner launched the startup to help restaurants learn how to eliminate waste, saving them money and helping them become more efficient in the process.

Sustainability and coding wasn’t the original goal. When Matt Wampler first left college, he was offered an opportunity to try to turn around a failing Jimmy Johns, a famed sandwich shop, in Maryland. Through “luck and hard work,” Wampler, whose love for being on his feet and interacting with people led him to the restaurant industry, resuscitated the location before opening three more.

But a lot of that time was spent sitting and staring at spreadsheets, missing dinner with his family as Wampler tried to address the waste that all restaurants deal with. The restaurant industry loses an astonishing $162 billion each year in food waste, with about 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year in the United States alone, according to FSR. Wampler wanted to help restaurants figure out how to address this waste to both help save them money and make them more efficient.

“I don’t come from the sustainability world, I really came from the restaurant world. And ultimately, it’s an efficiency problem that hurts the planet and restaurants,” said Wampler. “And so we’ve kind of hyper-focused on this one little solution where we can have that dual impact, where we can help the profitability of restaurants and also really make a meaningful reduction in food waste.”

So when the pandemic arrived, hitting restaurants especially hard, Wampler used the time to teach himself how to code. He realized that many of the issues he saw in those former spreadsheets could have been addressed using AI. As the pandemic raged on, an estimated  90,000 restaurants shuttered their doors either temporarily or permanently, according to the National Restaurant Association (NRA).

That’s when Wampler, who now resides in Philadelphia, and his partner, Osa Osarenkhoe, created ClearCogs, a company that uses technology to try to solve the waste issue facing most restaurants.

Restaurants turn over their data — such as daily transaction data, recipes, and menus, short and long-term trends, patterns, etc — and the ClearCogs program looks through what can be reduced so that the company can make a “data-driven decision” about its needs.

“Restaurants have really been dealt a bad hand when it’s come to technology for a long time. And that’s changed,” said Wampler. “I equate (the current) forecasting in the restaurant industry a lot like forecasting weather back in the 70s, where you read, you know, the newspaper and said, ‘oh, it’s, it’s gonna be sunny out,’ but you’d walk outside, and it’s raining, right? Machine learning AI has fundamentally flipped this, like, script on that … we’re able to do some really powerful things.”

ClearCogs, whose investors include Math Venture Partners & Lofty Ventures, is focused on giving tangible solutions to restaurants to be more profitable and reduce waste. The company does this by providing answers to questions that most restaurants have every day, such as “How many bagels do I need to bake this morning?” or “What do I need to bake two hours before closing so I don’t have excess ingredients?”

Wampler and Osarenkhoe partnered with 18 graduate students from Duke University, all of who were doing their masters in quantitative management. Together, they looked at data from various restaurants and concluded that food waste is a result of over-prep at the very end of the supply chain. Last April, they put this finding to the test at multiple Jimmy John’s locations and “cut the bread waste in half.”

For More Visit https://www.thegreencities.com/business/how-clearcogs-addresses-food-waste-in-restaurants-using-ai-learning/