Pushkin. The other day, I was talking with Matt Rogers about thermostats, specifically the way home thermostats looked back around twenty ten. If folks even know what a VCR is, they had these like VCR like interfaces, like it would like just blink twelve or blink eights and you have no idea what to do. They're responsible for like some between eight and ten percent of global emissions energies controlled by this thirty nine dollars plastic box in the wall.
No one cared about that product, despite it being so important to our daily lives. So I kind of just had to dig in and fix it. And that's what I spent the next nearly decade doing. And by dig in and fix it, Matt means that he co founded Nest, a smart thermostat company that Google ultimately bought for around four billion dollars. And that's the kind of stuff that gets me really interested, like, what are these things that are out there that are really important but we just
kind of take for granted. Now Matt thinks he's found his next big, really important, taken for granted thing. The garbage in your kitchen. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem? My guest today is Matt Rogers, the co founder of a new company called Mill. This is the last episode in our series on the future of food, and appropriately enough, we're talking about what happens to food after we're done with it. Matt's problem is this, how do you turn the food you throw in the garbage
back into food. When Matt describes Mill, it sounds for a while like he's just talking about a high tech garbage can. But then there is this twist. I don't want to spoil it, but I will say that it is a big twist that will be hard to pull off. You might not work, but if it works, it could be a really big deal. Mill just came out of stealth mode a few weeks ago, but Matt has been working on the project since the early days of the
pandemic Spring twenty twenty. We're all stuck in our houses, locked in, kind of walling on our own filth, screaming children, you know all the things. I get a call from an old colleague from Nest, Harry Tanabaum, who someone I was very close to on the Nest team. I mentored him for a lot of years. I am pacing on the balcony in our San Francisco house. No one is
allowed to leave their home. I get a call and he says, Matt, Matt, I've been reading a lot of PDFs and websites about waste and no, like seriously, it's a it's a very hairy thing that could open. That's a good lead. I'm reading DAFs about waste. It's like, this is really bad. It's much worse than we think.
And waste, waste meaning garbage like waste like garbage, Yes, Like one minute something is valuable and we use it and we love it, and the next minute it's like, oh, we got to toss this away, And what's it about that minute where it transitions from like valuable and awesome to like trash? Huh? And that was intriguing to me. And so it's almost like it's almost like the philosophy of garbage, like garbage as an idea. Indeed, yes, like
is trash inevitable? And we didn't discuss this on this call, but like as as Harry and I dug into it over the months, the learning was waste as an existent nature, like waste is like human construct and it is not inevitable. And that was kind of the sea crystal of this idea of like, oh, like what if we made a company that could end waste and what would that look like? And I knew from my insight days, from my family office work, I knew how big the climate, the climate
part of this equation was. And what is the connect between food waste and climate change? Okay, I guess yeah, that's this is not obvious. It wasn't obvious to us either. It takes a lot of energy, water, land to grow our food. We have to drive it in trucks, often refrigerated, to get to grocery stores, get to our houses. It's like tennish percent of global emissions is the food that we've wasted. And then when food goes to landfill. This
is all obviously not intuitive either. It doesn't just biodegrade, like the bid appeal of trash is actively a bad thing because it releases methane, which is like an ad x more potent greenhouse gas than CO two. Okay, so you got the call from Harry, When do you decide that you're in that you're gonna get back in started
other company? Oh? Literally two hours later? Again, like this is the my instincts are pretty strong and big problem and a problem that is worth solving that I had been looking at and had not seen kind of a holistic solution yet, and also a problem that I could help on. Like when I think about what makes a great entrepreneur, it's not just that like they've got this drive to solve a problem and the problem is really big, but also like do they have the skills to actually
impact that problem? And this is one really where the problem is behavior. It's like what we do in our kitchens. And that's the thing. Actually I know a lot about I spent a lot of time in people's homes helping design great products. What are you guys imagining when it's just you and Harry thinking, Okay, we're gonna do this, Like, what's the kind of vague set of thoughts you have
about what to actually do? The first thought is, what if we built a new product that would go in your home to make it really easy to separate food waste at home. We're told that it's a good thing to do, but it's really hard to do it and for our household. Swathie and I are like we are climate evangelists. We spend our whole life working on climate change,
and we've tried composting. We actually had one of those countertop bowls in our kitchen and there was a point where we actually had to stop because the fruit flies literally invaded our house and we had this like yellow sticky paper hang all around our kitchen. It just was way too hard. So most people don't know that it's important to separate your food waste, and for those who do know it's important, it's really hard to do it. Okay, I buy all that, And what are you imagining when
you start building a bin? What do you have in your mind? What is this trash can going to do? So first and foremost, it has to not smell, And that's a crazy thing to say. You're going to put food in it and leave it there for days? Pasably it and it has week weeks weeks? Why weeks? Why weeks? Ah? So why weeks? If you're going to change a daily ritual, it's got to be really easy. It's got to be
the easiest thing in the world. And today, the easiest thing to do with your food waste is throw it in the trash And the side effect of that is you're taking out the trash almost every day. So part of building a better system is not only can it not smell, but like, can we drop that chore? Could you take out the trash like once or twice a month? Okay, that is a very tall task if you can think about that way, right, I mean, like even in one day, that countertop bin is thinking I know I have one,
and it's true. So that was kind of the task we set out for ourselves. So how do you figure out that part? Yes, okay, we spent honestly months on experimentation, and tell me some of the things you tried that didn't work. Oh okay, I think my favorite experiment that didn't work is we try this kind of microbial technology and are there bugs or fun guy that can kind of break down food and eat it. And that's kind
of some of the essence of how composting works. It turns out actually a lot of those mechanisms are actually inherently stinky. I mean, presumably we evolved to be a verse to rotting food basically, right, Like it smells bad to us for a reason. It smells bad because if
danger danger, you will get sick. So okay, so the microbes don't work so what happens Our chief scientist who kind of leads our Seattle team, doctor Jeff Hill, was burning some food scraps in his lab like literally like like one of these like pyrolyzing ovens was laying them on fire and yeah, scientists, two fun stuff. I gotta get one of those ovens. And he's like, Matt Harry, food waste has more energy than wood, and we're like,
what I mean? It has more energy than wood? And a guess this this makes sense, Like our food has calories. Calories is energy. So like we start digging in to like what he's learning, and he's like, wait a second, here, if we dry the food a kins like drying out wood, like it preserves the energy, and like, oh, this is cool. And then he also has his next Aha, he's looking at the materials and he's like, if we dry out, it preserves the nutrients, so like preserve the calories, preserved
the nutrients. Like oh, and like in hindsight, this is like a no brainer, like oh, like we just invented drying things out. That's like a dehydration. Like we've been in We've been in this for astronaut food for decades, right, like or like beef jerky. It's like this has existed for really thousands of year old technology. That's why this is cool. So what we land is like if we dehydrate the food, it doesn't smell because it's preserved basically. So now you still have the problem if you want
it to be there for weeks. You know, people throw away too much food, right, the trash can is gonna get full, correct exactly, So uh, like beef jerky is still pretty big. So it's cool is we have this kind of notion of like you dry it and you grind it at the same time. So and these things actually work synergistically because as you grow ended up, it
makes it easier to get the water out. And food is about eighty percent water, so as you're grinding and drying it out, it gets really really small, really really small, like eighty percent size reduction. So if you can imagine, you know, you've got a big dinner party and you filled up the bin. You wake up the next morning and there's like this brown powder at the bottom. You're like, oh,
where did all the food go? It's because there's mostly water, so okay, So like that is a really elegant plan I imagine it's hard to actually make all that happen inside a trash can that somebody can just put in their kitchen and plug in. Incredibly difficult, Yes, incredibly difficult. One. It's like in the getting to from the wetness to the dryness, there's still some wetness to get there. So what do you do with any odors that are created in that that twenty four hour period of the twelve
hour period. And our engineers kind of scoured the world for like the most effective, the highest surface area activating charcoal in the world, and we found this really cool coconut core based product that has like a square mile of surface area in our little can. It is pretty wild. So so you you put all this together and you make a thing. You make a high tech trash can that will grind up and dry out your food waste. Tell me about the thing you landed on. What's it
look like? How does it work? Yes? So what we what we built is a new kind of bin that it's about two feet tall, looks like a kitchen trash bin, beautiful like white white steel wood vinear top, like a beautiful steel pedal, and is effectively a bottomless pit so two feet tall, normal size of trash bin. But because it's drying things out automatically, every night, you fill it up and during the day and you wake up the next morning and it's basically empty. It takes three ish
weeks to fill up. What does it look like after it's ground up and dry. It's like looks a coffee grounds. It's actually we call it food ground coffe ground because it literally looks a coffee grounds. Okay, and it's a very familiar thing, like, oh, like brown's dry, it's kind of fluffy. Yeah, it's coffee grounds, but it's food. But it's cool. Because this material is dry and small and shelf stable, we don't need to get it out of the house in a garbage truck anymore. You could put
it in the mail. So we did a partnership with the US Postal Service to put this material in the mail back to us. Wait, that's a that is a major twist putting it in the mail. It is indeed it was for us too. Why the mail? Why the mail? And also what is Matt and Mill gonna do with all of the food garbage that people are starting even now to send back to Mill in the mail? That we'll explain everything in a minute. Okay, let's get back
to the show. Matt is explaining how he and his colleagues decided to have customers mail their garbage back to Mill, and also how Mill is going to try and turn that garbage into food for chickens. Why the mail, Like like I feel like you've sort of solved the problem already, Like I don't know what's what's going on with the mail?
Why the mail? Well, as I mentioned, like, our lead scientists had spent months then analyzing this material and it has energy, it has calories as nutrition, and he had this moment where he's feeding it to his chickens in his backyard and they love it. And we talked, we talked to some more scientific advisors, we talked to some experts and they're like, yeah, this is this is a thing. Like we used to do this as a society back in the day. Whatever food we didn't eat went into
the backyard to feed the chickens of the picks. That's how humans used to live. And as society has gotten more and more industrialized, we've kind of gone away for that and we don't farm in our backyards anymore. That's just not how we live. Most of us don't live that way. So just that you know, it would be a shame to compost this stuff. It's rocket fuel. Like we got to preserve the food. We need to get it back to us so we can get it to farms.
And as you can imagine, like that's a pretty tall task, Like how do you get like hundreds of pounds of material per household? How do you collect that? Suddenly you're in a super different business, right, Like sure, selling people a fancy trash can, like I get that, but like having them mail back to you the dried out food garbage way, It's like that's like a huge change in what I'm imagining you doing. And it seems like a huge change in complexity. It seems borderline absurd that I'm
gonna be mailing back my garbage to you. This is our journey. I would say. There's a combination of skill and luck in all entrepreneurship. Yeah. One of our founding team members, Alissa Pollock, was one of the first people at uber eats. She was one of the founding team members of uber Eats and ran business operations for them, and so she had looked at all sorts of different logistics models that exist, and you know, she's super creative.
And one of the things that she pushed us on is like, hey, like we don't need to drive trucks around to pick this stuff up. Like it's small and light, Like, let's put in a package and ship it. So, like, we made some calls and we talked to some folks at the postal Service and a few folks that were retired from the postal service. We talked to some of the people who do package collection and I was like, yeah, that seems doable, Like you could mail a whole tree.
These days, you put all sorts of stuff in the mail, and especially because it's shelf stable, like, yeah, we could pick this up. And one of the first kind of thoughts we have is like, oh, like this can't be good for the environment, like mailing boxes of dried food. That can't be a good thing. Right, So a lot of you you got a lot of moving stuff around driving it, that's right, I think that this can't be a good thing, right. So, being an environmentally conscious team,
we actually did the analysis. We built a full life cycle analysis of this, and we realize actually, like it's diminimous. Okay, the methane generating power of this food waste is so high. And actually the trucks from the mail are already come in your house anyway. Yeah, like they're dropping off packages, the dropping of letters every single day, and the trucks usually go back empty. I buy the carbon footprint, that
sort of climate change piece. It's more the operational part of this, like, well, we haven't even gotten to the point like sure, let's say I can get the food waste back to you. Let's say it's convenient for me. Let's say the environmental footprint is fine, you still gotta get it to a chicken. And by the way, you might be feeding that chicken the chicken that I ate and dried out, which feels a little weird. Is it?
Is there a sort of health risk there for like any kind of human consumption of cons eating chicken, Like is that a piece one is concerned about? So the key is we get the material back to us, we filter out any contaminants, We pasteurize the material again, so kill any pathogens those kind of things, and we blend it all together. So let's say, like if you only pizza, we're gonna blend your pizza scrap household with everybody else. So you have a factory now that to do this,
Like have you built this in advance? Yep, of course, we gotta build the whole end to end. This is so much harder than tell it a fancy trash can. This is this is so much harder the nest and it seems like a huge amount of the sort of operational challenge. Slash risk is the back end, right, Like it seems like in a weird way, drying out the trash is the easy part, and like getting it from my house to a chicken, that part seems like I can't.
That part seems very hard and like it might not work. Yeah, this is the double black Diamond of startups. Yeah, it's like just building hardware is hard, Like most hardware startups fail because of execution, right, like that, A, you have a marginal costs that you don't have in software, and you have to get lots of people to buy it, and you have scale problems, like it's hard to sell a fancy trash can. And this is so much harder than selling a fancy trash can. Right, that's right, but
we've got to solve it. End to end again, like, okay, if there's any friction for people, they're going to not do it. And what are you going to do with hundreds of pounds of dried food? So we had to get it back. Where is your processing facility? You have this? It exists now are first ones outside Seattle, and over time we see us building more and more around the country. Like, as we have more customers, we have more density, we
should build facilities in every city. So you process it and then you sell it to chicken farmers as chicken food. We sell it to farmers as chicken foods, as an ingredient to chicken food. It won't be the exclusive thing a chicken will eat, but it's like it's called twenty twenty five percent of a chicken's diet. Is there any kind of regulatory hurdle you have to clear for this to work? We actually are actively going through this today, Like we are deep in the scientific and regulatory process
and review for this new feed ingredient. Okay, so you have to get approval from what USDA or something. It's kind of a blend of USDA and FDA. We are still working through their process. So if your product is a hit. Are you going to have a warehouse full of prime chicken food ingredient that you can't sell yet?
Is that a risk at this moment? Not yet. We're gonna need to use a lot of the feed we create for R and D and for the you know, for the first several weeks months, we're probably gonna use most of this material for R and D. Wow, Okay, so I think I've got the whole arc. We've got the whole arc. Well, let me ask you one more question. What's the business model? Ah? So the business model is we've built this all, this, this full loop from your kitchen table all the way back to the farm, and
we've built it as a membership. So you don't buy the bin okay, like you don't buy new charcoal filters when they run out. You don't pay for the mail. It's all included for about a dollar a day a dolt, So like thirty bucks a month, thirty three dollars a month. Thirty three dollars a month is kind of a lot for garbage, right, it's whatever of four hundred bucks a year, certainly if you're not paying for the kind of marginal garbage bag. Right, if it's if it's a true incremental cost,
certainly most people aren't going to pay that. You don't need most people. So like who is your who is your target audience? Who are you starting with target customer? I should say yeah. So the way we think about it today is for folks who have felt the pain. And when I say the pain like the pain that my family had, they had the fruit flies and made Maybe they've got rats, Yeah, maybe they've they've tried composting and they just don't have the time, order the space
to do it. A dollar a day for a less stinky kitchen sounds like a great idea to me and for me like a dollar a day for one less choice are I'm in? Yes, Although to be clear, you still have to take out all your other garbage all the time. I mean, I recognize that if food is most of your garbage, you take it out less. But still, if you know you still got to take out everything else. When you take food out of the trash, dream your garbage can fills up pretty slowly. Yeah, and it doesn't smell.
So Actually, like for our house, we take out the garbage now like every three four days. It's a big difference for us we talked about the emotional side, Let's talk about the rational side of it. The rational side is in most cities in the country, you pay per month to your waist your waist bill based on the size of your trash cart at the curb. So in San Francisco, I have a sixty four gallon cart, I
pay like seventy bucks a month for it. If I downsize to a thirty two or a sixteen gallon cart, I'm gonna save like twenty or thirty bucks a month. And this exists around the country. People have no idea, and most people are on the big big bins. So people are paying by how much trash they put out now. And this might, if not pay for itself, pay for part of itself, just by people paying less for their traditional garbage collection. Exactly. You got it, exactly similar story
that we had a nest. So yes, you're buying this premium thermostat, but over time it's going to help you save money by using less energy. It's a very similar analogy. Yes, I know that in a lot of rural places there is not garbage collection, and you have to pay to go to the dump, and often you pay by the bag, like when I was thinking, who's going to use this thing that you're selling? That's what I thought of. I mean,
is that is that part of your target audience? Absolutely, And actually for folks that live in rural areas that don't have pick up, they may even often have uses for the material themselves and they don't even need to send it back to us. If they want to use this material themselves, they can absolutely use it themselves, like if they have backyard chickens, if they compost and have a garden, awesome. Yeah, we think it's really helpful for them too. So you're just about to launch, we're talking
the week before your big public announcement of this. As you you know, I'm sure that as a founder you have to be a wildly optimistic person at some level, right, you have to have some set of hope. But when you think about the things that might go wrong next week, next month, do you what do you think about? What
are you worrying about right now? Oh? Man, there's a lot actually, and there's probably a list of forty five things or fifty things, and I'm worried about these days, from the operational to like will the parts get to the manufacturing facility on time, and are we clear to build and one of the things that we don't know and are people gonna like it? We've been using it for months. I've been using at my house for about
six months. We've got a couple hundred people I've been feel testing it and we've getten some really good feedback. People like it, But like, are people gonna love it? It's too soon to answer that question on the show today. Neil just came out of stealth mode a few weeks ago. But if it's any consolation, we do have a garbage themed lightning round up in just a minute. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Let's finish with the Lightning round. Just a bunch of
fast questions. Fun, fun, fun, indeed, fun is what we're going for here. So I understand you're a Star Wars fan, and I'm curious of all the Star Wars movies, what's your favorite scene? Favorite scene. I'm gonna go with Luke Skywalker on hoff in Empire Strikes Back when he's like and Ben, you will go to Yoda my favorite scene at all Star Wars. It's just beautifully done. I really thought you were going to say the trash compactor. Oh, man, that's a good one. I feel like that's the that's
the mill scene. Man, they're in a trash compactor and it's even feeding the weird animal. Oh my god, there's a weird animal in there. Yeah, that's hilarious. Let's talk about garbage a little bit. What is the smelliest thing that people put into the garbage in a typical household. Oh, we've actually created a stink bomb for the office. It's kind of a mix of garlic, shrimp, kimchi. It is
some stinky stuff. Like one of the things our engineers have challenged us with is they put our bins in our conference rooms in the office and they load them up with these stink bomb recipes and just let them run and we'll be in the room having our meetings, doing our discussions and not smelling anything. And that is the bar like stink bomb recipe, no smell. Who's your
favorite Backstreet Boy? Ooh? AJ? And the reason why is he's carrying the team now Like AJ is really like coming to his own and actually like twenty twenties Backstreet Boys is unbelievable. Like, thank you, AJ. We appreciate you. If you weren't working on food, what would you be working on poop? Poop? Maybe diapers? Like, what are all these other stinky garbage ee things in the house? Methane bomb? Super gross? Does it have to be? So you've done thermostats,
you're doing garbage. You think you might do diapers next? Look, poop is not out of the question. Strong, what's the most surprising thing you've learned about garbage? I think I'm still surprised by how much of the economy is to handle and dispose of the stuff that we're done with. It's like a multi hundred billion dollar industry that we've effectively taken for granted. It doesn't have to exist and it's really really really big. Well, that's good for you
as a founder. If we can have some efficiency gains, the money is there, we can get some of the how money to make our business work. Yeah, that's actually one of our theses behind the company is we're building something new, but people pay for waste today. We pay a lot for waste today. So yes, Like, is there a better way of doing things that we can shift over time? Absolutely anything else we should talk about. I
think stepping back like, this is attractable problem. And as someone who's spent twenty plus years looking at climate solutions and the things we gotta do, there's some areas that are really hard and we have to invent, like nuclear fusion to solve this is attractable, solvable problem. We have to keep food out of landfill, and like that is solvable, like we could do that. So the taglight is solving food waste easier than nuclear fusion, Easier than nuclear fusion.
Matt Rogers is the co founder and CEO of NIL. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo. It was edited by Sarah Knicks and Robert Smith and engineered by Amanda k Loong. I'm Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein, or you can email us at problem at Cushkin dot We'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem