Food Recycling Partnership Supports Local Farms
Valley of the Sun

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10 Million Pounds Recycled

Mill, a pioneering food recycling company, has teamed up with Phoenix-based R.City to combat food waste while supporting sustainable urban agriculture. Through their unique partnership, Mill collects nutrient-rich food grounds from its customers and delivers them to R.City’s local farm, where they’re transformed into compost. The initiative is already yielding promising results, showcasing how community-driven composting can reduce waste and enrich soil for local farming efforts. So far, Mill users across homes and workplaces have successfully diverted nearly 10 million pounds of food waste from ending up in landfills.

Today, Mill, the innovative food recycling company, released new data that demonstrates major momentum in its mission to eliminate food from landfills and reshape everyday behavior at home and work. With customer impact data, an updated life-cycle analysis (LCA), and growing local partnerships, Mill is unlocking ways to keep more food out of landfills, stop food waste before it starts, and create smarter, more efficient systems for households, workplaces, and communities.

“We know from our experience at Nest that people change their behavior when the better choice is also the easier one. That’s where Mill breaks through while other solutions fall short,” said Matt Rogers, Cofounder and CEO at Mill. “We designed Mill to be a no-brainer: simpler, cleaner, and more efficient than anything else out there—and the data shows that it’s working.”

With Mill, People Are Recycling More—and Wasting Less
Food waste remains one of the most overlooked global challenges. In 2019, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that just 3.7% of all food scraps nationwide were composted. Food is the single largest category in landfills, and when it breaks down it releases methane—a powerful greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period.

Mill is simple and intuitive to use, powered by the most in-depth view of wasting behavior in the country. This data fuels smarter decision-making for individuals and organizations, and helps drive meaningful change across the entire resource system.

To date, households and workplaces using Mill have kept nearly 10 million pounds of wasted food out of landfills. People using Mill are not only highly engaged—adding an average of one pound of food scraps to their food recyclers daily—but also reducing how much excess food scraps they generate.

According to a survey of Mill customers, even before owning a Mill, users recovered just over 26% of their food scraps (higher than the national average). But after bringing Mill into their homes, that number surged to nearly 90%.

Nearly half of surveyed Mill customers said they waste less food since adopting Mill. Among those, 60.4% say they’re cooking differently, 49.8% are shopping differently, and 46.7% have changed how they store food.

Internal Mill data confirms that over the first few months of use, customers reduce what goes into their Mill by roughly 20%—a sign that they’re changing how they buy, cook, and store food.

Mill’s approach—quietly drying and grinding food scraps into shelf-stable “Food Grounds”—makes it radically simpler to keep food out of landfills. Whether used at home, composted locally, or sent back to Mill to be turned into a chicken feed ingredient, food scraps are recovered as a resource and used to support the American food system.

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About Mill

Mill makes it easy to prevent food waste at home with an innovative new kitchen experience and pathways that keep food out of landfills. Food isn’t trash. Together, we can do better. Mill provides waste management solutions within the home appliance sector. The company produces a food recycler that processes food scraps into grounds for gardens or farms, using stainless steel augers and odor filtration. Mill serves consumers who aim to reduce kitchen waste.

Mill was founded in 2020 by Matt Rogers and Harry Tannenbaum, who worked together at Nest, building the iconic Nest Learning Thermostat and other smart home products. The lessons they learned about encouraging new habits at home that are good for people and the planet were applied in creating Mill to change our perception of waste, starting in the kitchen.

Mill is a trademark of Mill Industries Inc.

About R.City

The inspiration for starting R.City sprouted from the idea of creating a full-circle service by sending food waste to the same farmer that provides your produce. The service began in 2013 here in Phoenix – where they have continued to pursue this mission.

All of the food waste collected goes directly to our farm where we compost it ourselves. We use the finished compost on our farm to grow produce (without the use of chemicals or pesticides). Our produce is then available for purchase – completing the full-circle of our service.

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