Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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
(00:37):
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
(01:00):
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
(01:20):
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
(01:41):
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
(02:04):
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,
(02:26):
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
(02:49):
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,
(03:10):
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
(03:30):
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.
(03:53):
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.
(04:16):
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,
(04:39):
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
(05:03):
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,
(05:24):
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,
(05:45):
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
(06:08):
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
(06:31):
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
(06:52):
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
(07:13):
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,
(07:33):
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
(07:56):
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
(08:18):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:02):
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
(09:22):
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
(09:44):
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
(10:06):
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
(10:27):
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.
(10:52):
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
(11:14):
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.
(11:35):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:37):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:21):
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
(13:41):
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
(14:03):
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
(14:24):
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
(14:45):
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
(15:06):
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.
(15:27):
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,
(15:51):
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
(16:13):
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,
(16:36):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:21):
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.
(17:42):
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,
(18:03):
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
(18:26):
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,
(18:47):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:30):
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,
(19:52):
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
(20:13):
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,
(20:36):
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
(21:00):
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.
(21:22):
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
(21:44):
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.
(22:07):
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
(22:29):
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
(22:50):
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
(23:11):
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
(23:33):
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?
(23:57):
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.
(24:19):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:01):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:46):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:33):
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,
(26:54):
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
(27:16):
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,
(27:38):
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
(28:00):
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