NEFY (Not Expired Food, Yet)

By making information about discounted, nearly-expired food available to the local consumers, we can:

• stimulate their timely purchase and reduce food waste;
• help vendors recover part of the operational cost,
• through accumulation and analysis of the raw data, get insight into fluctuations of the product demand.

Updates in the supermarket’s inventory can notify subscribers about discounts on the nearly-expired food in the categories of their interest. Loyal, “green” consumers, who bought nearly-expired food in the past, may be provided with the options to “reserve” some items, say for 1-2 hours.

Accumulated data can help to understand trends in the demand for the nearly-expired food: is it specific to location, season, weather, sport or political events. If the businesses have internal statistics on the out-of-stock occurrences, they can adopt smart, machine learning driven supply chain to distribute relevant food items to the locations of higher demand to reduce cost / waste.

We throw away too much expired food every year, hugely contributing to the solid waste in the landfills around the world (with 160 billion pounds of food trashed annually in the US alone).

Through the global supply chain, so much efforts and resources spent on growing the food, its collection, packaging, transportation and storage. Still, roughly 40% of the food in the US is never eaten and just wasted.

As a contrast, 1 in 9 people globally (~ 820 million) struggles with hunger.

Global economic loss from the food waste is estimated at about $940 billion per annum. Less than third of it ($265 billion) could be spend each year to eradicate the global hunger completely. So, it seems to be quite a worthy problem to focus on, and support Circular Economy by enabling responsible consumption and reducing waste.

One side, our solution serves the food vendors (e.g. supermarkets), who need to dispose of nearly-expired food which was not purchased in time. Making daily discount details available through the NEFY channels (Web site, mobile app, social networks) can stimulate the sale and help the vendors to recover part of their operational cost.

On another side, NEFY will also serve local communities, who can contribute to the responsible consumption initiative by purchasing nearly-expired food at the discounted price either for their own consumption or by donating it to the relevant food banks and charities.

Overall, it can help to reduce food waste (and contribution to the solid waste), decrease associated economic loss, provide local communities with access to the daily updates on the discounted and still edible food.

It’s a “hub” solution, which will provide vendors with the API gateway to share inventory about nearly-expired food. By using RESTful interface, it can simplify integration process and make information about discounted food items available to the local consumers.

Engagement and partnership with the various vendors (e.g., supermarkets) would provide unique insight into the patterns of the food items demand. If certain categories left on the shelves for longer and not only in supermarket A, but also in other neighbour ones like B and C, then possibly there is a cause. Right now each supermarket chain operates with its own inventory and there is no cross-industry generalised trends details – something that NEFY can enable.

Accumulation of such data can feed then machine learning models and supermarkets would not only recover part of their operational cost through the responsible disposal of the nearly expired food, but can also get on top of that new Demand Analytics results. Such input would make vendor’s supply chain smarter by understanding patterns (seasonal or general trends) in unpopularity of certain food items in specific locations. If enriched with the vendor’s out-of-stock information (something that NEFY can offer at the later stage), then partnering vendors will be able to make informed decision about demand and either re-distribute the food categories to the locations with higher demand or reduce delivery to others (and reducing the cost throughout the whole supply chain).

Local consumers can be provided with the various NEFY channels to receive daily information about nearly-expired food. It can be Web site, mobile app or even social channels like Twitter or Facebook. You will have a choice to check updates online, or subscribe to get notifications.

People may also get additional “green” or “loyalty” points through the purchase of nearly-expired food. Such customers may also be able to reserve certain items for 1-2 hours and enjoy convenience of collecting them upon arrival to the vendor’s shop.

There is also consideration to offer such “green” loyalty platform as a service to participating vendors, by deploying blockchain platforms like Ethereum and developing smart contracts, which would generate loyalty points based on the price or quantity of purchased of nearly-expired food. By helping vendors to dispose such food items responsibly, consumers then may potentially use accumulated points to receive discounts in the participating chains or donate them to the charities of choice.

Most of the retail vendors, incl. the ones in the food industry, operate in silos. There is not much of cross-industry cooperation, with the focus being mainly on the competition.

While it’s understandable, it’s not possible to ignore huge waste of the food, economic loss from its disposal and contrasting figures of the people, incl. children, who struggle with hunger.

Responsible consumption is responsibility of both vendors and consumers. NEFY can provide cross-industry platform, so that the vendors can share daily updates on the discounted nearly-expired food to stimulate their sale, recover part of the cost and CRITICALLY contribute to the shared database to get down to the potential causes of the low demand for specific food items in specific areas and for the specific periods of time.

Machine Learning requires a lot of data to improve accuracy, and such cross-industry accumulation of data can provide unique insight and enable “smarter” supply chain. So, using Peter Drucker phrase, NEFY can indeed create new dimension of performance in the age-old process of selling food to the consumers.

The core solution will utilise Big Data concept, by collecting daily update on the nearly-expired food from the participating vendors and enabling then its processing by the supervised and unsupervised machine learning models to identify trends and hidden patterns.

Subscription by the consumers for the specific food item categories as well as information about out-of-stock occurrences can highlight higher demand for those categories and assist vendors with optimisation of their supply forecast.

Demand analytics will provide information about historical changes in the food items demand, volumes of the nearly-expired food sale and in the future iterations enable “what-if” forecasting options.

Blockchain (and particularly, Ethereum platform) can be utilised to assess quantity of the nearly-expired food purchased by the consumers to generate “green” loyalty points, using relevant smart contracts build in Solidity.

Consumers would be able to access information about discounted nearly-expired food via Web site, mobile app and social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). They can also subscribe to the notification list, by providing their contact details, food categories of interest and geographical location.

Because it will become a cross-industry solution, and uniquely gather information about the nearly-expired food from the participating and competing vendors. Such data can provide real insight into the trends of specific food items leaving on the shelf longer till expiry date.

Consumer subscription and indication of their categories of interest can also become a new factor in planning supply of food to the relevant geographies.

And overall, sharing information about nearly-expired food with the local consumers can stimulate their sale and reduce food waste and vendor’s loss.

Right now it’s a conceptual idea, with early stage prototype planned for the later July development. That’s why it is not serving any vendors or consumers at the moment. In one year time, we plan to pilot test it in one London borough, and promote idea and lessons learnt + results across others. In five years time, after release of the source code openly, we plan to make NEFY solution available globally, serving millions of people and actively contributing to the reduction of food waste on our planet.

First year the focus will be on the development and testing of the solution in the selected geography, to collect feedback and suggestions from both vendor and consumer communities which will help us to improve user experience, polish the quality and stability of the solution and work on proposed new features.

Within five years time, we hope NEFY to become part of the global food waste reduction movement and platform facilitating dialogue between local consumer communities and growing number of participating vendors for the better demand-supply planning.

As it’s planned to release the source code of the platform, intention is to allow replication of the solution across the world and nurturing active community of developers, who will contribute to the further enhancement of NEFY capabilities.

As a newly established startup, we need to build trust and relationship with the leading supermarket chains in the London borough to promote the idea and work with them on the data integration and consolidation, as currently there are no significant cross-industry cooperation on the food waste reduction.

We also need to work with and get support from the local authorities and NGOs, to define the goals, promotion activities and the actual Business model.

In five years time, as a part of global expansion it would be necessary to cooperate with the local enthusiasts and developer communities to embed new features for the support of local Business requirements, incl. language, currencies, availability of technologies like social networks, etc.

For the first year barriers, we plan to approach Mayor of London to discuss the solution, its benefits and value to the local communities and vendors. Securing Mayor office’s support would help to facilitate the dialog with the leading vendors and agree on selection of pilot locations / supermarkets as well as cooperation with their IT teams on the integration and data unification in NEFY backend.

In five years time, barriers in the global rollout of the platforms will be addressed by the local NEFY enthusiasts and supporters. From our side we’ll help with sharing our learnings and experience gained in the early rollouts and also engage our partners / vendors from other locations, if required.

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Our team consists of 2 full-time employees:

- Kamola Shavkiyeva, co-founder, CEO and CFO

- Laziz Turakulov, co-founder, CIO

Kamola has her degree in Finance, AAT NVQ4 and studies towards her ACCA qualification, was an accountant in a joint venture and currently works part-time in a private accounting consultancy. She also has experience of working in one of the UK high-street charity organisations. Kamola can speak English, Russian, Uzbek, Tadjik and early beginner in Italian.

Laziz has his degree in IT and certified in various technologies from SAP, IBM and Microsoft. He has experience of building solutions in Azure, AWS and GCP, Machine Learning hobbyist with interest in Deep Learning using TensorFlow. Laziz can speak English, Russian, Uzbek, Tadjik and early beginner in Mandarin Chinese (passed HSK1).

We are not partnering with any organisations yet. Plan to establish relationship and discuss potential partnership, once we get our prototype ready for the initial pilot testing.

Our key customers are the food vendors on one side and local consumers on another.

Vendors will provide daily updates on the inventory of nearly-expired food and discounted price, to share it with the local communities to facilitate sale through the new cross-industry sharing model and in return will not only get those food items disposed responsibly with part-recovery of their operational cost, but also will get insight int dynamics of food categories demand and interest of the local consumers on specific food items.

Consumers will use NEFY platform to search for, reserve and buy nearly-expired food items of interest, subscribe to the notifications, collect “green” loyalty points and, if interested, support relevant charities and food bank organisations.

As a non-profit startup, we aim to promote sustainable and responsible food consumption. To fund platform development and hosting, intention is to get nominal percentage from the nearly-expired food sold through the platform.

Reputation of MIT Solve and good cause of building a better world for our people and planet as a part of UN Sustainable Development Goals initiative can provide weight to the discussions with the local authorities and food vendors.

Intention is to change the way how business work with the local communities and compete between each other. So, backing from MIT solve can help to decrease resistance and allow potential vendors to see the actual Business value and optimisation potential for themselves particularly and for our environment in general.

Becoming “Solver” can also attract talents to contribute to the platform development and secure funding from potential investors and philanthropists, as well as promotion of the platform itself globally.

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On technological side, would be interested in partnership with Microsoft, Google or Amazon to work on the platform development in their cloud environment and get assistance from the product team to utilise existing and future capabilities in Machine Learning, Big Data, Blockchain, Web + Mobile and Integration areas.

On the Business model side, we would be interested in a partnership with the leading supermarket chains, like Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, to select pilot sites and food categories, work on the data exchange channels, consolidate data unification, discuss loyalty options (to build on top of their existing loyalty programmes) and popularise new initiative via in-store advertising.

NEFY may become first ever platform which would consolidate discounted offers on the nearly-expired food from the competing vendors. So, it can provide unique opportunities to get insight into demand for the food categories and help industry to optimise its supply chain and reduce cost.

In Deep Learning space, there are 2 leading platforms: TensorFlow backed by Google and PyTorch backed by Facebook AI. AI Innovation Prize would allow the use of TensorFlow or PyTorch experts (possibly even from Google or Facebook AI product team) to develop re-usable algorithms, which can be then released under Open Source license to ML enthusiasts for the review and further development contribution.

Neuroscience research is a very hot topic and AI Innovation Prize can support exploration of the Neuromarketing techniques. There are already consumer-grade headbands available to read brainwaves and assess concentration or relaxation levels. But we can go a bit further and invite consumers who buy nearly-expired food to provide their feedback on the food products and potential future offerings, while analysing their overall bodily response via brainwave headbands, galvanic skin response wristbands, vocal tone and face mimics. It may help to understand drives in the local communities for specific food types, factors influencing their choice and discover new ways of the food waste reduction.

NEFY may become first ever platform which would consolidate discounted offers on the nearly-expired food from the competing vendors. So, it can provide unique opportunities to get insight into demand for the food categories and help industry to optimise its supply chain and reduce cost.

In Deep Learning space, there are 2 leading platforms: TensorFlow backed by Google and PyTorch backed by Facebook AI. GM Prize would allow the use of TensorFlow or PyTorch experts (possibly even from Google or Facebook AI product team) to develop re-usable algorithms, which can be then released under Open Source license to ML enthusiasts for the review and further development contribution.

Enterprises can then easily adopt this platform to apply it to other industries as well. That’s why quality of the solution, its richness and also security + privacy protection (to ensure that participating vendors get the value out of it without losing competitive advantage) would of paramount importance. Prize’s funding can help to cover the cost of A-level specialists and provide contribution of universal and adaptable models to support other industries and Business processes.

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