Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive: Emily Ma on Solving Food Waste
In a discussion with Astro Teller, Emily Ma from X (formerly Google X) delves into the multifaceted problem of food waste and the moonshot projects developed to tackle it. They explore Project Delta, an initiative that created an "air traffic control" system for surplus food, and Project Chorus, a broader supply chain moonshot designed to give every object a voice through advanced sensors and software.
The Scale and Complexity of Food Waste
Food waste is a pervasive and systemic problem with significant economic, environmental, and social consequences. In the United States alone, 40% of the food produced never reaches a person’s stomach, representing a shocking level of inefficiency in a multi-trillion dollar global industry. This loss is not just about discarded calories; it has a profound environmental impact. Upstream, agricultural land, water, and labor are wasted. Downstream, food waste in landfills is the most significant source of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Unlike a one-time decision like buying an electric vehicle, reducing food waste requires continuous behavioral change at every meal. It’s a complex systems problem where fixing any single component is insufficient; a holistic approach is necessary to change the overall equation.
Project Delta’s Origins: From Kitchens to Dumpsters
The journey to tackling food waste at X began with direct, visceral experience. Emily Ma’s initial curiosity was sparked during a culinary internship in Google’s kitchens, where she witnessed the sheer volume of food being prepared and subsequently discarded.
This led to a more profound, hands-on investigation aligned with X’s philosophy of making contact with the real world. The team conducted a “waste audit,” manually sorting through a week’s worth of trash from the X headquarters in the parking lot. This exercise provided an unforgettable, tangible understanding of the problem. A key finding was that a significant portion of waste came from compostable cups and plastic bottles, leading to immediate changes. More importantly, it made the abstract concept of waste concrete, revealing perfectly edible food, like a whole apple, being thrown away.
Early prototypes even involved equipping garbage cans with camera systems, akin to “Google Glass for a garbage can,” to automatically log and categorize discarded items. This system captured over 20 million instances of waste, providing a rich dataset to identify patterns and validate assumptions about waste generation.
Deconstructing the Food Supply Chain
Waste occurs at every stage of the food supply chain, a system described as “very lossy”:
- Farms: Farmers often grow surplus to meet contractual obligations, as they cannot control for weather. This excess is frequently tilled back into the ground.
- Processors: Industrial machinery can be inefficient. For example, a machine might chop off the top third of a strawberry to remove the stem, wasting a significant amount of edible fruit.
- Distribution & Logistics: Perishable goods have a limited shelf life. A single “bad apple” or a refrigeration failure in a truck traveling cross-country can lead to the entire shipment being rejected and sent to a landfill.
- Retail: Retailers cannot always sell through their entire inventory, and while some is donated, much of it is composted due to the logistical challenges of donation.
- Households: Consumers are the largest contributors, accounting for 40% of food waste in the United States.
Building an “Air Traffic Control” System for Surplus Food
The core challenge with surplus food is matching supply with demand under tight time constraints. A truckload of tomatoes rejected by a retailer has hours, not days, to find a new home before it spoils. The existing system relied on phone calls—an inefficient, ad-hoc process.
The team was inspired by Dana Yoast of the Southwest Produce Cooperative in Arizona, a major port of entry for produce from Mexico. Dana was effectively running a manual “air traffic control” in his head, using his knowledge and relationships to reroute truckloads of surplus produce to food banks that could accept them. He knew, for instance, “the folks in Oklahoma will never say yes to eggplants.”
The goal of Project Delta was to create a digital, scalable version of Dana’s brain—a system that could solve this complex logistics problem, which combines elements of the “knapsack problem” and the “traveling salesman problem.” This “air traffic control” system needed to:
- Understand Needs and Relationships: Codify the unspoken rules and trusted relationships within the hunger relief network.
- Manage Logistics: Account for the physical constraints of moving and storing thousands of pounds of perishable goods.
- Standardize Communication: Create a common language for describing food products to avoid confusion (e.g., “you say tomato, I say tomato”).
From Prototype to Open Standard: Open Product Recovery
The air traffic control system evolved into Open Product Recovery, an open-source set of data and communication standards. It functions as a decentralized network where organizations can spin up their own “node.”
The system uses concepts inspired by blockchain to “franchise trust.” If Organization A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A can trust C through the network. This allows offers of surplus food to propagate rapidly through a trusted network, automating what used to take days of phone calls. Dozens of nodes are now active, used by partners like Feeding America and the FarmLink project, which has moved over 300 million pounds of food.
Project Chorus: Giving Every Object a Voice
Running in parallel to Delta was Project Chorus, a broader moonshot to solve supply chain inefficiencies by giving every object a voice. The vision was for any item—a carton of strawberries, a pallet of vaccines—to be able to report its location and condition in near real-time. This awareness allows for intervention before a problem occurs, such as a temperature deviation that would spoil a product.
An early Chorus prototype involved tracking fish shipments in Japan. The team debunked the long-held belief among sushi chefs that air-freighted fish was always superior. By tracking the temperature, they discovered that fish left on a hot airport tarmac was of far worse quality than fish that remained on a temperature-controlled truck for the entire journey.
The Moonshot Debate and Graduation
For a time, there was a debate within X: Was the moonshot solving food waste (Delta), with Chorus being a necessary tool? Or was the moonshot creating a universal tracking system (Chorus), with food being just one application?
Ultimately, both projects were allowed to evolve. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Chorus team quickly pivoted to the healthcare space, recognizing the critical need to track vaccines, 30% of which are typically discarded due to temperature issues.
Delta graduated from X to Google, where it could focus on coalition building with industry partners like Kroger and Walmart, leverage Google’s philanthropy arm to support food banks, and develop the open standards for Open Product Recovery.
The Philosophy of Moonshot Thinking: The Importance of Play
Solving huge, difficult problems requires a specific mindset. The journey of innovation is often depicted as a map with a “giant pit of despair” in the middle. To cross this pit, it’s essential to approach the work with joy, humor, and a spirit of play.
This is not about a lack of seriousness; it’s a strategy for success. The team is serious about the outcome, but playful about the process. Play builds the deep human relationships necessary to persevere through the inevitable challenges. For a journey as difficult as a moonshot, “being playful is actually the way to maximize the chances of something really valuable happening.”