Hellmann’s launches AI-enabled tool to reveal fridge’s meal potential

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

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 phones 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 year. This means that an average household wastes the equivalent of eight meals a week, with fresh fruit and vegetables frequently wasted the most. Every day in UK homes we throw away approximately 2.9 million potatoes, 1.4 million tomatoes and the equivalent of 2.1 million 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.

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 climate action NGO WRAP, which is working to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future.