Etihad Airways is going to resume trials for the detection of special food waste using artificial intelligence to track unconsumed economy class meals across the Etihad flights. Due to COVID 19 pandemic has stopped these trials in these trackers earlier in the year and now the airline has once again restarted the program with the help of the collaboration with Singapore startup Lumitics.
And according to the food technology company, Etihad must see these results with the first few months of their operations, already this system is used by several other airlines in Singapore, this system uses the combination of image recognition and AI to differentiate and helps to identify the different types and quantity of unconsumed meals based on the design of the meals foils.
Many airlines have some of the other systems to identify and count the food waste but these processes are generally slow and labor-intensive. The company says that this automated system from Lumitics could provide an ROI between 200% and 1000% with the first years of the operations. Mohammed AI Bulooki, Chief operation officer of Ethihad’s says that they are excited to restart the project and also continue the work that has begun. Also, this project will have potential support that helps to reduce food wastage and also improve the guest experience at the same time by enabling Ethihad to plan inflight catering in a relevant, efficient as well as effective way.
Etihad should also have to quickly identify unpopular dishes and replace them with the menus that are more appealing to the passengers on a route based on the route. Also, they are stopping to load meals based on the passenger’s load, and instead, they have decided to tailor meals count to what the Lumitics insight system. Like for example, they adjust the loads by finding the passengers that take advantage of the complimentary meal offering on morning departures.
And by 2030 they are estimated to produce 10 million tons of waste annually with most of the fresh foods needing to be wasted on the arrival only because of the strict health regulations, this trick is done to minimize the amount of food being loaded without any cutting back.
Also in the future airlines are going to ramp up pre-order options but presently for time being they are using the machine learning process for helping them to reduce the amount of wasted food which is produced by airlines and by also significant cost saving.
