Mill may have started with households, but co-founder and CEO Matt Rogers says the food scraps startup has long aspired to expand to commercial customers.
“That was part of our plan from our Series A deck,” Rogers told TechCrunch.
Now, with an official deal inked with Amazon and Whole Foods, the company’s plan to profit from handling other people’s food waste is a little more public.
Whole Foods will develop a commercial-scale version Millfood waste bin in each of its grocery stores starting in 2027. The bins will grind and dehydrate waste from the produce department, reducing costly landfill fees, while also providing feed for the company’s egg producers. Both reduce the company’s overhead costs and reduce its ecological footprint.
At the same time, Mill’s bins will collect data to help Whole Foods understand what’s being wasted and why, helping the grocer further control costs. “Ultimately, our goal is not just to make their waste operations more efficient, but to move upstream so they actually waste less food,” Rogers said.
The company started selling food waste bins to households a few years ago. As might be expected from a team that built the Nest thermostat, the devices are well-designed and—to borrow a Silicon Valley cliché—can be a joy to use. My kids got a kick out of the bins while testing the first and second generation.
“Starting with the consumer was very intentional because you’re building the proof points, you’re building the data, the brand, the loyalty,” Rogers said. Many members of the Whole Foods team were already familiar with Mill when the two companies started talking.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
“It’s really a sales strategy for our businesses,” Rogers continued. “We have conversations with senior executives at various of our ideal customers, and if they don’t have Mill at home yet, we say, ‘Hey, try Mill at home, see what your family thinks.’ It’s a surefire way to get people excited.”
The startup began having conversations with Whole Foods about a year ago, Rogers said. In the following months, Mill introduced the consumer version in some of the chain’s grocery stores.
Mill has also developed an artificial intelligence that uses an array of sensors to determine whether food that goes into the bin should still be on the shelf. Minimizing “shrink” — the industry term for sales lost to waste or theft — can give grocers an edge in a cutthroat market.
Progress in large language models was key, Rogers said. When he and Mill co-founder Harry Tannenbaum were at Nest, it took dozens of engineers and a “Google budget” more than a year to train Nest Cameras to recognize people and packages. With new LLMs, Mill needed only a handful of engineers and much less time to deliver superior results, according to Rogers, who said “Artificial intelligence is a huge enabler.”
The use of artificial intelligence allowed Mill to deliver a commercial version faster, diversifying its customer base and source of revenue.
“If you’re a one-channel, one-customer business, you’re fragile,” Rogers said. “I grew up at Apple in the iPod era,” he said. “Apple at the time was a one-legged business. The iPod was about 70% of the company’s revenue. That’s why we made the iPhone. Steve [Jobs] he pushed us really hard on the iPhone because he was worried that people like Motorola – who were working on smartphones at the time – would start eating our lunch in the iPod business and that it would crush us. We needed to build another leg of the stool.”
And it looks like Mill isn’t done adding legs to his figurative stool. Rogers said he is working on building a municipal business as well.
“We continue to add more legs to the stool and add more diversity to the business,” he said.
