This Startup Wants to Redirect Your Food Waste to Feed Animals

May 30, 2023

Harry Tannenbaum, left, and Matt Rogers, with a prototype of the Mill Kitchen Bin.

Matt Rogers helped create the smart home. Now he wants to reinvent your kitchen garbage.

Mark Bergen

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The device blends right into the room. It looks like a trash can—one of those sleek, steel models, cream-colored with a small foot pedal at the base.

Matt Rogers skips across the room to show it off. He taps the pedal to open the bin's lid and reveal a pile of what looks like thinly shaved brown mulch, the dehydrated remnants of three week's worth of his colleague's household kitchen scraps. This mush once included discarded fish bones, now unnoticeable. Fish, banana peels, eggshells, an entire turkey carcass after Thanksgiving—Rogers says it can all go in. He hired a mechanical engineer, who once built motorcycles, to design the grinders at the bin's bottom, stainless steel paddles and hammer blades that churn and pulverize the foodstuff. It's only meant for food but could handle errant objects. "You could probably throw like a metal fork in there–it won't break the machine," Rogers says, leaning over the bin. "It's ridiculously robust."