Unilever’s Hellmann’s mayonnaise brand has created a new AI-enabled tool called ‘Meal Reveal’ that aims to help households use up more of the food they have in their fridge. Developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, people can use their phone’s camera to scan the ingredients in their fridge. They are then offered recipe ideas that match those ingredients.
The brand noted that the tool 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 is said to provide a time-saving solution for consumers struggling to make sense of how the ingredients in their fridge can make a meal.
The company highlighted that household food waste persists as an issue in the UK, with 4.7 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten wasted each year. This means that an average household wastes the equivalent of eight meals a week, with fresh fruit and vegetables frequently thrown away.
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.”
