Hellmann’s has created a new AI-enabled tool ‘Meal Reveal’ to help households use up more of the food they have in their fridge with great tasting recipes. Developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, people can use their phone to scan the ingredients in their fridge and be served with delicious recipe ideas to match those ingredients.
To use Meal Reveal, people scan food in their fridge using the camera on their mobile phone, sharing either video or uploading pictures on the app. The tool utilizes generative AI capabilities in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to identify the ingredients. Then the tool further matches the foods to recipes to provide tasty recipe suggestions.
Household food waste persists as an issue in the UK: 4.7 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten at home is wasted each year. This means that an average household wastes the equivalent of eight meals a week, with fresh fruit and vegetables frequently wasted the most. Every day in UK homes we throw away approximately 2.9 million potatoes, 1.4 million tomatoes and the equivalent of 2.1 million carrots.
Hellmann’s Meal Reveal was designed in response to the common issue of ‘fridge blindness’, a contributor to household food waste. This describes the issue faced when a fridge is full of ingredients, but people aren’t able to see or imagine what meals to make. Meal Reveal provides a time saving and convenient solution for consumers struggling to make sense of how the ingredients in their fridge can make a quick, simple meal.
Christina Bauer-Plank, Hellmann’s Global VP, said: “People never set out wanting to throw food away. Food waste is an unintended consequence of our busy lives, where we look in the fridge after a long day and see disparate ingredients but nothing to eat. We saw an opportunity here to create a straightforward, easy to use tool. Meal Reveal is powered by the latest Google technology where a simple scan of the leftover ingredients lets you see the delicious potential in your fridge, in the palm of your hand.”
Laurence Lafont, Vice President, Strategic Industries EMEA, Google Cloud, said: “Our generative AI technology has the power to create everyday solutions for people everywhere. As part of our longstanding partnership with Hellmann’s, we were excited to create the innovative solution Meal Reveal to a persistent challenge of seeing the possibilities of the food in our fridge. In its nascent stage, the more people use Meal Reveal, the more the tool will learn ingredients in our fridges and help provide the best recipes to use up what we already have.”
Hellmann’s is committed to helping people enjoy great tasting food for the simple pleasure it is, without worry or waste. Each year, Hellmann’s inspires more than 200 million people across the world to be more resourceful with their food. Meal Reveal is the latest way Hellmann’s is helping people get creative in the kitchen with its mission to Make Taste, Not Waste.
This new tool from Hellmann’s is being unveiled during this year’s Food Waste Action Week from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, delivered by climate action NGO WRAP, which is working to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future.
To learn more about Meal Reveal and use the tool, visit Hellmanns.com/meal-reveal.