What's cooking: How Hellmann's is using Google Cloud AI to turn leftovers into meals

Food waste is a huge problem. In fact, according to WRAP, 4.7 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away each year by UK households. And up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not eaten.

To help reduce household food waste, Hellmann’s — best known for their tasty mayonnaise — released a Meal Reveal tool utilising AI to make delicious meals out of the ingredients already in your fridge. This AI kitchen sidekick uses Google Cloud, providing the massive processing power needed to analyse a fridge's contents and match them to delicious recipes in near real time.

Here’s how it works:

• Scan your stash: Point your phone at your fridge's ingredients and either snap some photos or record a quick video. It's like inventory time for your leftovers.
• Analyse ingredients: Meal Reveal uses Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform. Tools like Gemini Pro Vision and PaLM 2, along with Unilever’s AI validation, help to identify individual ingredients, from stray veggies to forgotten proteins.
• Get meal suggestions: Vertex AI Vector Search and a Unilever proprietary algorithm searches through a recipe database and suggests delicious recipes that go beyond the obvious, encouraging culinary creativity.

Meal Reveal launched today during WRAP UK's Food Waste Action Week, a campaign which aims to bring businesses, government organisations and global partners together to develop tools to cut food waste and help consumers save money.

Try Meal Reveal out today, and learn more about how we’re using generative AI to improve food systems,