The kitchen is the last unmeasured room in food.
The intelligence layer for the household economy. Passive awareness of food at home — powering consumer savings, retail intent, and food-system sustainability.
Every $1 invested in food waste reduction returns $14.
The economics already work — we're building the platform that captures it.
Source: Hanson & Mitchell, cited in UNEP Food Waste Index 2024
Five forces are converging on the household.
UN SDG 12.3 commits governments to halving food waste this decade. The UK has aligned.
Households are actively seeking ways to cut spend and waste. £1,000 a year per family is the prize.
Connected hardware no longer needs explaining. The category is built — we extend it.
Supermarkets must now report downstream consumption emissions. No instrument exists to measure them. We are it.
Computer vision can now identify groceries without manual input or barcodes. The friction problem is finally solvable.
These forces don't usually align. They do now.
Validation before scale capital.
Hardware proves itself before scale capital deploys. The MVP mobile app is built, the AI architecture is in build, and the retail intent infrastructure and ESG measurement framework are in place. The current phase tests the app, the simulated supermarket and the intent signals with an early-access cohort, alongside grant-funded technical development.
Consumer subscription powers the household intelligence from day one — recurring, low CAC, high LTV. Affiliate commissions on B2B purchase-intent signals add monetisation as the user base grows — turning real-time consumer need into qualified conversion for retailers. At scale, anonymised household consumption data becomes the highest-value layer — stock optimisation, pack-size planning, range and margin intelligence that retailers cannot source anywhere else. Each layer unlocks the next.
Alignment with the NGOs and key bodies leading the fight against food waste positions Kitchen AI for inclusion in the food-loss-and-waste pack post-validation, opening a route to US retail. Grant-funded development extends the technical build. Post-launch, the validated measurement framework creates a defensible position for grant applications — non-dilutive capital that can support rollout and scale once the core platform is proven.
The first investor is the founder.
Gavin Mackay has spent over two decades building, scaling, and systematising businesses in some of the most demanding, regulated environments in the UK. He grew a children's care group from a single home to eight, to over 100 staff and over £6m revenue, then built the leadership structure and operational systems that let him move from Managing Director into a non-executive Chairman role — still shaping the group's direction, but proof he builds organisations that run without him.
He has first-hand experience of the full software development process, having commissioned and directed a four-year build of a bespoke operational platform now being brought to market. He knows how to appoint the right technical people, guide them, and hold them accountable through delivery — the same discipline he now brings to Kitchen AI's build across hardware, AI, and cloud.
He is fully committed to Kitchen AI: 100% of his time, and personally funding the build. Drawing a salary from the group he still co-owns, he is funding the hardware proof of concept, the IP work, the branding, content, and marketing, and the ongoing operational costs of the business — putting his own capital into the riskiest phase, and taking nothing out, before asking anyone else to fund scale.
"Proving it with his own capital first. Building the rest together."
Validated against the science, not against itself.
Most food-tech companies claim to reduce food waste. Almost none can prove it. Kitchen AI's measurement framework — developed with Dr Sophie Attwood, founder of Behaviour Global and formerly of the World Resources Institute — validates platform metrics against the academic gold standard for household food-waste measurement.
Convergent validity testing against the Household Food Waste Questionnaire — the peer-reviewed instrument used across food-waste intervention research.
Van Herpen et al. (2019)
Named, defined, defensible: Waste Prevention Rate, Waste Occurrence Rate, Validated Disposal Events, and seven behavioural indicators — auditable in a way most food-tech outputs are not.
Randomised intervention-and-control protocol. Baseline, 30-day, 60-day follow-ups. Evidence that Kitchen AI causes waste reduction — not that it merely coincides with it.
The target outcome for households using Kitchen AI versus control. Consistent with the strongest results in published food-waste intervention research.
Building methodically, household first.
Assembled for the hardest parts of this problem.
Kitchen AI isn't selling cameras.
It's building something much more valuable.
Food is where we start. The household is what we come to understand — its health, its habits, its daily decisions.
Every layer compounds the data, and the data is the moat. Very few companies will ever hold this picture of a home. That scarcity is the prize.
A household tool with planetary consequences.
Kitchen AI does two things at once. It saves a household money and time, supports its dietary needs and health goals, and helps it eat better without trying. And through the very same data, it attacks one of the largest problems on the planet: food waste. Every household we help is waste removed from the system.
That alignment opens doors a consumer app alone never could. We are in active conversation with Pete Pearson, a senior figure in the fight against food waste at WWF. His view is that Kitchen AI can be added to the food waste pack, a pre competitive route that puts us in front of US retailers as part of a shared effort to cut waste, rather than as another vendor asking to be let in.
That is also where the commercial prize compounds. Once we evidence the closed data loop in the UK, the post checkout consumption and waste data that no retailer has ever had, the same relationships give us a sequenced route into the United States. We start in the UK by design. The opportunity does not end there.
We start with the UK household. The system we are building reaches much further.
Hardware validation underway. Register your interest.
We're closing our pre-seed alongside hardware validation through summer 2026. Add your name to the list — for the round, a partnership conversation, or simply to follow the build.