Mill, the innovative food recycling company, released new data that demonstrates major momentum in its mission to eliminate food from landfills and reshape everyday behavior at home and work. With customer impact data, an updated life-cycle analysis, and growing local partnerships, Mill is unlocking ways to keep more food out of landfills, stop food waste before it starts, and create smarter, more efficient systems for households, workplaces, and communities.
Mill is sharing new results from its community composting partnership with R.City in Phoenix, where Food Grounds from Mill customers are collected and composted at R.City’s local farm. Customers can opt into a Farm Box and enjoy fresh produce grown with the help of their own food scraps.
“We know from our experience at Nest that people change their behavior when the better choice is also the easier one. That’s where Mill breaks through while other solutions fall short,” said Matt Rogers, Cofounder and CEO at Mill. “We designed Mill to be a no-brainer: simpler, cleaner, and more efficient than anything else out there—and the data shows that it’s working.”
Mill’s first community composting partnership has delivered significant operational and infrastructure benefits. 5X faster growth rate for R.City, more efficient routes, with fewer individual pickups required, and up to a 4X increase in customer capacity using the same vehicle fleet.
In Phoenix alone, food kept out of landfills from the Mill x R.City service has translated to a reduction of more than 10,000 ton-miles in garbage truck weight off the roads—roughly the equivalent of a ten-ton truck driving 1,000 fewer miles. Miles off the road contributes to lower operational costs for haulers and a better use of local infrastructure for cities. For people at home, it means a cleaner kitchen and a lighter trash bag.
By helping more residents get engaged in keeping food out of the trash and sending scraps back to farms, Mill and R.City’s partnership not only boosts participation in community agriculture but also fuels the growth of local business—showcasing a model of circular impact that other cities and composters can rally behind.
To date, households and workplaces using Mill have kept nearly 10 million pounds of wasted food out of landfills. People using Mill are not only highly engaged—adding an average of one pound of food scraps to their food recyclers daily—but also reducing how much excess food scraps they generate.
According to a survey of Mill customers, even before owning a Mill, users recovered just over 26% of their food scraps (higher than the national average). But after bringing Mill into their homes, that number surged to nearly 90%. Nearly half of surveyed Mill customers said they waste less food since adopting Mill. Among those, 60.4% say they’re cooking differently, 49.8% are shopping differently, and 46.7% have changed how they store food. Internal Mill data confirms that over the first few months of use, customers reduce what goes into their Mill by roughly 20%—a sign that they’re changing how they buy, cook, and store food.
Mill’s approach—quietly drying and grinding food scraps into shelf-stable “Food Grounds”—makes it radically simpler to keep food out of landfills. Whether used at home, composted locally, or sent back to Mill to be turned into a chicken feed ingredient, food scraps are recovered as a resource and used to support the American food system.
