Reykjavík Grapevine - maj 2022, Qupperneq 23

23The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 05— 2022
Makin! Food
Waste A Thin!
Of The Past
This female-led team is helpin! restaurants save food
Have you ever had to throw away food
and felt guilty afterward? Or cooked
way too much pasta for a one-person
dinner, put it back in the fridge and
never looked at it again? There’s no
doubt that food waste is a huge prob-
lem, but a startup from Iceland is there
to solve it—for now, at a restaurant
level. We spoke with Jillian Verbeurgt
and Renata Bade Barajas, co-found-
ers of GreenBytes, about how exactly
it works.
Facing the problem
Jillian and Renata came to Iceland to
study sustainable energy. Five years
later, they are still in the country, but
their professional interests shifted
when the idea to start GreenBytes came
in the summer of 2019. “While we were
doing our Masters, we both worked in
restaurants and threw away lots and
lots of food,” shares Renata. “It was such
a shame. I came up with a little spread-
sheet and asked everyone to write down
what they threw away, but no one did
it.” Renata put the idea on hold but
realised that one could use algorithms
to predict what's going to be sold and
figure out the right amount of food to
order. A little later, she contacted Jilian
and the work began.
Innovation behind the app
GreenBytes claims their app helps
restaurants to organise their produce.
“We allow them to keep track of their
distributors, break down their menus,
and track their stock,” explains Renata.
“The biggest thing we do is predict what
they're going to sell in the future, and
tell them what they should order based
on what they're going to sell. That's
where our algorithm comes in. It takes
in past sales, weather and holidays, and
predicts future sales.”
Can weather affect your restau-
rant sales? Indeed. “Imagine a hot
day. Would you want a hot soup? Or a
smoothie?” points out Renata. “On a
nice day, I want to go out and sit on a
patio and have someone cook food for
me. I don't necessarily want to be in my
own kitchen,” adds Jillian.
The GreenBytes algorithm can look
at thousands of patterns at once. To
build it, Jilian used data from an Icelan-
dic restaurant. “It's all historical data
from the restaurant. With its help, we
can analyse the sales trends in the past,
and try to make predictions about the
future,” she shares.
GreenBytes did a case study at a local
midsize restaurant in Iceland. “We saw
that in a month we could reduce 251
kilos of food waste, which is approxi-
mately 628 kilos of CO2,” tells Renata.
“For that particular restaurant, the
economic benefit would be more than
8,000 euros, which is about 1 million
ISK per month.”
Restaurants pay a monthly subscrip-
tion to use the app. There are differ-
ent packages for setup—the team also
offers assistance with this—with the
final price depending on how big the
menu is.
On challenges and future
plans
Jillian is originally from Canada and
Renata from Mexico. They didn’t know
anything about the Icelandic startup
market before they embarked on their
journey with GreenBytes. They confess
that startup life does remind them of
a roller coaster sometimes. “It is diffi-
cult,” agrees Renata. “I do think that if
we were Icelandic, we would be a tiny
bit further ahead than we are now. Even
with sales or restaurants with older
owners, it's just easier and better to
have first contact in Icelandic,” speci-
fies Jillian, and immediately adds: “The
people we’ve had interactions with and
the programmes we've gone through
were really nice. Everyone's been super
supportive, we’ve made really great
connections, even great friends.”
Recently, GreenBytes has been
nominated for Best Newcomer Award
by Nordic Startup Awards. They’ve been
bootstrapping for the past year and are
currently raising a funding round.
In the next five years, GreenBytes
will be going international, but first,
the team wants to perfect the solu-
tion in Iceland. Jillian says: “It's really
important for us to get it right here
before we fumble our way forward.” In
the future, Jillian and Renata hope to
make GreenBytes somehow transfer-
able to bigger institutions, like grocery
stores, and canteens.
“I would love to see a future where
we optimise the entire food supply
chain, because food waste doesn't
just happen in restaurants or houses,
it happens from the second we start
growing food,” concludes Renata. “If
we can predict what people in Reykjavík
are going to be eating, we can tell farm-
ers how much food they need to grow.”
The future GreenBytes envisions
does seem a bit brighter—I leave the
interview inspired and will definitely
think twice when buying too much food
or throwing it away.
Words:
Iryna Zubenko

Photos:
Joana Fontinha
Innovation
“Food waste
doesn't just
happen in
restaurants
or houses, it
happens from
the second we
start growing
food.”
GreenBytes in action
CEO Renata Bade Barajas & CTO Jillian Verbeurgt