🌐 Racing the Clock: Wasteless Turns Expiring Food into Profit for Grocers Worldwide

The Price of Waste: How Wasteless Turns Lost Food Into Found Profit

Every year, billions of dollars vanish from supermarket shelves—buried in landfills in the form of perfectly good food that happened to hit its expiration date.

For grocers, this loss is often seen as just another line item. The cost of doing business. 

Yet the scale is staggering.

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon in the world, behind only the United States and China. It’s not just carbon emissions; it’s also lost profits, mounting supply chain pressure, and the moral failure in the face of global hunger.

Oded Omer understood that. He’s a builder by nature. Pinball machines, radar systems for airports—if it needs building, talk to Oded. He’s also the co-founder of a startup that grew to 120 employees across 18 countries and was acquired by AB InBev, the global beverage giant.

On a family trip to Norway, he saw the problem from a new perspective. He stood on the same patch of ground where, as a kid, he once snapped a photo on top of a glacier. Now the glacier was gone.

A childhood memory, lost to a warming world.

He’d been mulling the problem of food waste with his former co-founders. Now he knew it was time to act.

He called his lawyer from the glacier. “Incorporate the company. We’ll figure out what we’re doing later.”

That company became Wasteless.

The Problem: A System Built to Fail

Supermarkets have been stuck in a model that guarantees waste. Perishable goods march toward arbitrary sell-by dates. No one knows the right price to ensure they sell. So managers wait, and wait, and then slash prices by 40%, 50%, or more at the last minute.

The result? Billions in losses, food sent to landfills, and a shrug: it’s just the cost of doing business.

Oded’s blunt: “That’s absurd. If you’re throwing food away, you’re throwing profit away.”

He’s heard every excuse:
✅ Our waste is within the numbers.
✅ It’s the cost of doing business.
✅ Consumers will game the system.

His response? “That’s nonsense. You’re not losing money because customers are gaming your pricing engine. You’re losing money because you don’t have a pricing engine.”

The Solution: Dynamic Discounts, AI-Powered

Wasteless doesn’t just suggest discounts. It builds a new operating system for pricing perishables.

Its AI solution predicts exactly how much to discount, when, and where, so food sells before it spoils.

A sirloin steak might get a 2.4% discount at one store, while yogurt gets a 7% cut at another. It’s not the last-minute panic markdowns shoppers are accustomed to—it’s precise, dynamic pricing, tuned to the SKU, the shelf, and the store.

“It’s reinforcement learning,” Oded explains. “Reward and punishment. The system trains itself, SKU by SKU, shelf by shelf.”

And it works.

✅ Dutch supermarket chain Hoogvliet reduced food waste by 30%, cut markdown costs by 50%, and recaptured up to 4% of lost revenues after deploying Wasteless.

✅ Spanish grocer DIA saw a 32.7% drop in food waste across salads, fruit, and ready-to-eat meals. Revenue rose 6.2%. Ninety-eight percent of customers approved, praising both the transparency of dynamic discounting and the store’s leadership in fighting waste.

✅ Italian retailer Iper La Grande reduced food waste by half and increased product margins by 1.2 percentage points after implementing Wasteless across its poultry and meat operations. Revenue soared 110%.

✅ A chain of 200 stores added $18.2 million to the bottom line of the meat department and prevented 2.2 million pounds of meat waste.

✅ Carrefour, the global grocer with 14,000 stores across 40 countries, launched Wasteless in France and recently expanded to all 640 stores in Argentina.

It’s a solution that transcends cultures. “Consumer attitudes toward food waste are the same everywhere,” says Omer. “Nobody likes to see good food thrown away.”

And Wasteless has a trick up its sleeve: its tech is cash-flow positive for grocers from Day One. That’s instantaneous ROI.

It’s also a tech solution that’s easy to integrate and easy to scale globally. It boosts profit, cuts carbon, and proves that food waste isn’t inevitable.

“You have to build a product that integrates fast and delivers results from day one,” says Oded. “That’s how you go global.”

Now with offices in Israel, Amsterdam, and New York City, Wasteless is making it happen.

The Category Is Built

But none of Wasteless’ success was preordained. Oded didn’t just have to build a new tech product; he had to build an entirely new category for dynamic discounting.

After that 2016 glacier visit, Oded and his team spent years educating, pitching, and pushing to shake the industry from its acceptance of mediocrity, disbelief in Wasteless’ potential, and the bureaucratic inertia common in companies worldwide.

He steadily won over converts and earned contracts. While resistance was still entrenched, the industry started to move.

One executive told him, “Tesco built a system like this.” Oded didn’t miss a beat: “Sure. They built a spreadsheet and slapped stickers on products. Then Tesco’s family office invested in Wasteless.”

Today, when retailers issue RFPs, they don’t ask for “dynamic pricing software.” They ask for a “Wasteless-like solution.”

It’s the Kleenex of dynamic markdowns. The Netflix of perishable pricing.

Building Climate Solutions That Scale

Oded’s story offers a playbook for building climate tech:
✅ Don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with the problem.
✅ Build solutions with undeniable economics and minimal integration requirements.
✅ Create the category. Become the default.

The problem was straightforward: supermarkets were guessing at prices, wasting food, and losing profits. Oded’s solution? Build the engine that turns waste into cash.

And he’s still climbing—literally. Eight months ago, Oded summited Mt. Everest with his co-founder and his oldest son. When he got back down, he said: “I can climb Everest 10 times. It’s still easier than building a startup.”

Supercool Takeaway

Oded set out to tackle food waste and built a global solution that cuts carbon, boosts margins, and improves business.

Wasteless didn’t just launch a product. It created a category that it now dominates. Today, when retailers write RFPs, they ask for a “Wasteless-like solution.”

The future of food isn’t waste. It’s smarter pricing, stronger supply chains, and fresher shelves everywhere.

Profit-first. Impact-always. Wasteless is leading the way.

Listen to this podcast episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: $1 Trillion

Food loss and waste cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion every year. That’s not just wasted food—it’s wasted land, water, energy, packaging, and labor. A massive, avoidable drain on supply chains, profits, and the planet.

Quote of the Week:

“The idea came when I stood in a supermarket and thought, what if we could harness the power of dynamic pricing? You and I would enter the same store, and we wouldn’t necessarily pay the same price for a Chobani that expires in two days versus six.”

— Oded Omer, Co-founder & CEO of Wasteless

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Related

Next-Gen Solutions Tackling Food Waste

Food waste is a business problem, a climate risk, and a supply chain inefficiency. These companies are transforming waste into value, reducing carbon emissions, increasing profits, and demonstrating that circular systems can be scaled.

Too Good To Go connects consumers with surplus food from restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores, offering discounted “surprise bags” at the end of the day. The app operates in 19 countries and has saved over 400 million meals, helping businesses recover costs and build customer loyalty. Last week, it went live in Oklahoma.

Apeel draws inspiration from nature to create a plant-based coating that extends the shelf life of produce, enabling major retailers to reduce shrink, protect margins, and minimize waste. Backed by Bill Gates and the World Bank, Apeel’s technology is already in stores across the U.S. and Europe.

Imperfect Foods takes surplus and “ugly” produce that would otherwise be discarded and turns it into a growing e-commerce grocery business. Since 2015, the company has saved over 172 million pounds of food, demonstrating that market inefficiencies can be converted into value. It’s not just fresh foods; even Liquid Death fans can get great deals on sparkling water.

Volare transforms food industry byproducts into high-protein insect meal for aquafeed, pet food, and poultry, cutting emissions up to 8x lower than soy. The Finnish startup recently raised a $29 million Series B round to fund expansion. 

Connecticut-based Bright Feeds uses AI and drying technology to transform surplus food into a nutrient-rich alternative to soy and corn for animal feed. The company supplies feed distributors and dairy farms across the Northeast, diverting tens of thousands of tons of waste from landfills each year.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

My latest article for Fast Company: The Secret to Scaling Climate Solutions? Don’t Sell Climate.

Podcast appearance on The Tech Leaders Playbook: Climate Innovation That Actually Sells, No Green Premium Required

Podcast appearance on The CTO Show: Stop Pitching Tech, Start Selling Outcomes: Josh Dorfman’s Advice for Climate Founders

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