Utah-based startup Prism helps restaurants tackle food waste with novel storage tech
Summary
From cold plasma and cold storage to edible coatings, there are multiple ways to extend the shelf-life of produce moving in bulk through the supply chain, but precious few options once it arrives at the back door of a restaurant, say the founders of Utah-based startup Prism.Thats where the innovation tends to stop, say Hunter Lindsay and Jacob Zundel at Prism, one of six grantees to receive funding through the new ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund, an initiative designed to tackle food waste in restaurants.While we tend to think of the food left on diners plates as the principal source of waste from restaurants, Prismwhich emerged from a business accelerator at Brigham Young Universitytargets food that spoils before chefs have used it.While this can be minimized through better inventory management, restaurants always throw some unused produce away because they cannot predict with laser accuracy what customers will order on any given day, says Lindsay. They need to maintain some positive inventory [so they can offer every dish on the menu].After surveying a couple of hundred restaurants in Utah, Linday and Zundel found that many were tackling the problem with high-frequency shipments from suppliers, a costly and carbon intensive way to ensure they always have what they need.According to Lindsay: We would talk to them about food waste and they would say, Oh, its not that much of a problem, until we realized their solution was to reach out to US Foods or Sysco and get deliveries every day or every other day. Weve miniaturized industrial technology to put inside of bins that enable fruits and vegetables to last 2-3 times as longand upwards of 8 times as long in some cases.Unlike Seattle-based startup Ripelocker, which creates a near-vacuum in large drums designed to move produce in bulk through the supply chain, Prisms containers are at one atmospheric pressure, but we change out the different gases in the same way that a warehouse does on a large scale, he claims.Its not practical for restaurants to have to hook up CO2 and nitrogen and remove oxygen like they do in an industrial environment, so we developed a way to pull all of the different atmospheric conditions from the air. Were still running tests on their lifespan, but we dont want customers to have to do maintenance, so once they buy them, they will last.Our models project that if a small to medium sized restaurant implements this system with five bins, they will make back or save $2,500 within a year through reduced frequency of shipments and reduced food waste.As for feedback from restaurateurs Prism has been speaking to, says Lindsay, its been pretty positive, as its a market segment that hasnt been tapped, he claims. There are lots of solutions for industrial-scale applications from sprays to controlled atmosphere, but really nothing that specifically targets restaurants and potentially end consumers like this.To date, Prism has been funded through various grants but is now looking at raising money to help commercialize the technology, says Lindsay, who studied molecular biology and graduated in December 2023, while Zundel, who studied entrepreneurial management, graduated in April 2024.Weve talked to a couple of different manufacturing partners, but we believe we should be able to set up manufacturing fairly quickly now that weve tested and validated the system on a small scale.
Funding
Review available funding amount, funding date, investors, and linked company information related to Utah-based startup Prism helps restaurants tackle food waste with novel storage tech in the interactive ISVWorld profile.