Meal Reveal, developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, uses simple fridge scan as tasty way to help reduce household food waste

LONDON 19 March 2024 – Hellmann’s has created a new AI-enabled tool ‘Meal Reveal’ to help households use up more of the food they have in their fridge with great tasting recipes. Developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, people can use their phone to scan the ingredients in their fridge and be served with delicious recipe ideas to match those ingredients.

To use Meal Reveal, people scan food in their fridge using the camera on their mobile phone, sharing either video or uploading pictures on the app. The tool utilises generative AI capabilities in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to identify the ingredients. Then the tool further matches the foods to recipes to provide tasty recipe suggestions.

Household food waste persists as an issue in the UK: 4.7 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten at home is wasted each year¹. This means that an average household wastes the equivalent of eight meals a week, with fresh fruit and vegetables frequently wasted the most.² Every day in UK homes we throw away approximately 2.9 million potatoes, 1.4 million tomatoes and the equivalent of 2.1 million whole carrots³.

Hellmann’s Meal Reveal was designed in response to the common issue of ‘fridge blindness’, a contributor to household food waste. This describes the issue faced when a fridge is full of ingredients, but people aren’t able to see or imagine what meals to make. Meal Reveal provides a time saving and convenient solution for consumers struggling to make sense of how the ingredients in their fridge can make a quick, simple meal.

Christina Bauer-Plank, Hellmann’s Global VP, said: "People never set out wanting to throw food away. Food waste is an unintended consequence of our busy lives, where we look in the fridge after a long day and see disparate ingredients but nothing to eat. We saw an opportunity here to create a straightforward, easy to use tool powered by the latest Google technology where a simple scan of the leftover ingredients lets you see the delicious potential in your fridge, in the palm of your hand”.

Laurence Lafont, Vice President, Strategic Industries EMEA, Google Cloud said: “Our generative AI technology has the power to create everyday solutions for people everywhere. As part of our longstanding partnership with Hellmann’s, we were excited to create the innovative solution Meal Reveal to a persistent challenge of seeing the possibilities of the food in our fridge. In its nascent stage, the more people use Meal Reveal, the more the tool will learn ingredients in our fridges and help provide the best recipes to use up what we already have.” 

Hellmann’s is committed to helping people enjoy great tasting food for the simple pleasure it is, without worry or waste. Each year, Hellmann’s inspires more than 200 million people across the world to be more resourceful with their food. Meal Reveal is the latest way Hellmann’s is helping people get creative in the kitchen with its mission to Make Taste, Not Waste.

This new tool from Hellmann’s is being unveiled during this year’s Food Waste Action Week from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, delivered by campaign action NGO WRAP, which is working to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future.

To learn more about Meal Reveal and experience the tool, visit Hellmanns.com/meal-reveal.

About Hellmann's
Hellmann's is committed to helping people enjoy great tasting good for the simple pleasure it is, without worry or waste. For over a century, the brand has helped people turn even the simplest ingredients into delicious meals. Hellmann's believes in the power of taste, because when food tastes good, less of it gets wasted. This belief has driven Hellmann's to be a force for positive behaviour change around household food waste. Hellmann's partnered with experts to conduct one of the longest and largest consumer behaviour studies on household food waste working with 2,000 families in the US and Canada gathering insights to help consumers better use the food they already have at home and to waste less. Hellmann's will continue to champion household food waste reduction through its "Make Taste Not Waste" campaigns, inspiring people to turn their left-behinds into easy, tasty meals. The past year alone, Hellmann's has been able to inspire more than 200 million people across the US, Canada, Brazil and the UK.

About Unilever

About Unilever Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Beauty & Wellbeing, Personal Care, Home Care, Nutrition and Ice Cream products, with sales in over 190 countries and products used by 3.4 billion people every day. We have 127,000 employees and generated sales of €60.1 billion in 2022.

Our vision is to be the global leader in sustainable business and to demonstrate how our purpose-led, future-fit business model drives superior performance. We have a long tradition of being a progressive, responsible business.

The Unilever Compass, our global sustainable business strategy, is set out to help us deliver superior performance and drive sustainable and responsible growth, while aiming to:

• improve the health of the planet;
• improve people's health, confidence and wellbeing;
• and contribute to a fairer and more socially inclusive world.

For more information about Unilever and our brands, please visit www.unilever.com.

About Google Cloud
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimised AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organisations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Editor Notes
To use Meal Reveal, people scan food in their fridge using the camera on their mobile phone, sharing either video or uploading pictures on the app. Utilising generative AI capabilities in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, the tool uses Gemini Pro Vision and PaLM 2 to identify the ingredients. Then the tool further uses Vertex AI Vector Search and a Unilever proprietary algorithm to match the foods to recipes to provide tasty recipe suggestions.

This news builds on Unilever and Google's long-standing partnership across Google Cloud, Ads and Creative, to boost brand performance. This collaboration showcases the potential for technology to transform marketing for brands.