At Mill, our mission has always been to make it easy to keep food out of landfills. To do so with lasting impact requires scale, which means Mill needs to be intuitive, sticky, and readily adaptable to a range of environments.  

As we shared earlier this year, a study of our national customer base reveals that not only do people love and use their Mill consistently, but also that, because of Mill, they change how they purchase, store and consume food. But to achieve this result at scale, it’s critical that we learn how the Mill system performs in environments beyond our direct to consumer offering. 

As we look to build relationships with municipalities and service providers across the US, Mill will be integrated into spaces where people haven’t actually paid for the service. Many people are not aware of available food scrap recycling programs let alone been in search of a solution. We need to know how Mill will perform in these different environments.

So, we put Mill to the test in what is traditionally considered the hardest environment to deploy a recycling system: a multifamily dwelling (MFD). 

And it worked.

How Mill Works

If you’re new to Mill, here’s the quick version. 

People put food scraps (pits, peels, rinds, leftovers, chicken bones, etc.) into the Mill food recycler and, overnight, it dehydrates and grinds scraps into a dry, shelf-stable material. We call this material food grounds, because that’s what it is: dried and ground up food. These grounds can be incorporated into municipal organics operations, home gardens, or returned to Mill where they are turned into food for chickens.

Across our national customer base, we continue to see steady participation, low contamination, and lasting behavior change. 

Our customers are motivated to do the right thing and many of them were already composting or source separating their food scraps from their landfill streams. 

So we wanted to know: how does Mill hold up in a context where:

(1) people receive Mill at no (or low) cost to themselves 

(2) they weren’t previously known to be searching for a food scrap recycling solution 

(3) live in a multi-family dwelling (MFD), which is historically the most difficult environment to introduce recycling.

The Pilot Setup

In collaboration with West Valley Recycles and HF&H Consultants, we spent three months scoping and selecting sites in West Valley, CA, followed by a month recruiting residents. 

We identified a treatment and a control site with as much similarity between the two sites as possible and prioritized finding a representative MFD (average or below average rent for the area). During the course of the pilot, Mill provided ongoing recruitment opportunities, education and customer support. 

This group wasn’t actively searching for a food scrap solution. The vast majority of residents had never heard of a food recycler, making them a perfect cohort for this pilot study.

The Results

Forty-eight percent of the building signed up to receive a Mill in their apartments, despite having no familiarity with the technology. That’s a strong number for any pilot, but it’s exceptional for MFD. 

Not only did people sign up, but they used their Mills. Over six months, participating households averaged nearly half a pound of food scraps per day, a remarkably consistent number, week after week. Adjusted for average household size, these participation numbers compare closely to what we see from our national customer base. 

Oftentimes at Mill, we hear, “Of course people use Mill; they are paying for it.” However, the results from this pilot demonstrate that engaging with Mill is not contingent on people actually purchasing the food recycler for themselves. People who receive Mill at no cost engage with the system in the same way. This finding is fundamental and is core to Mill’s ability to scale.

In fact, we were encouraged to see these similarities extended beyond just food scrap separation. The tendency to source-reduce food scraps, a trend we see in our customer fleet, was also reflected in our pilot participants. We saw almost the exact same 20% decline in food mass additions over the first four months. Mill has helped people become more mindful about what they buy, consume and waste. 

Survey results confirmed what the data showed: awareness was up, and behavior was shifting.

In under six months and with just under half the building using Mill food recyclers, we were able to increase the building-wide diversion rate from 6% to 31.3%. This is not a point-in-time statistic; it’s a cumulative and ongoing food scrap diversion rate for the whole building. Envisioning this type of behavior shift in an MFD was almost inconceivable just a few years ago. 

Conclusion

What we learned in West Valley proves that Mill can thrive in different environments and with a variety of implementation models–that the impact can scale.

We’re continuing to refine, learn, and collaborate with municipalities, property managers, and solid waste service providers to make food recycling an easy part of everyday life. Because when it’s simple to do the right thing, people will.

The future is bright.