In December of last year, I was fortunate to be able to attend COP28 – the United Nations conference on climate change – where I listened to climate scientists, business leaders, politicians, journalists and NGOs try to find solutions to the most urgent issue of our time: climate change. While energy dominated most of the conversation, I was heartened to hear more discussion around one of the most critical but overlooked elements of climate change: food waste. Our food system contributions 24% of all greenhouse gas emissions, second only to those from electricity. By comparison, transportation accounts for only 14% of greenhouse gas, and a large percentage of that transportation is used to move food.

The food waste problem is particularly pronounced in the restaurant industry, where nearly just 15% of unused food is recycled or donated, meaning that fully 85% is simply thrown away. This contributes to this staggering figure: 40% of all food produced worldwide goes to wastewhich means that nearly 10% of global greenhouse gasses could be cut overnight if we just changed our behavior and improved the global food supply chain.

The root causes of our dysfunctional supply chain

Our food system is the world’s most complicated jigsaw puzzle, connecting 540 million farms to 8 billion consumers. The average lunch in New York or LA, London or Shanghai might feature quinoa from Paraguay, avocado from Mexico, chickpeas from India, salmon from Scandinavia or beef from Argentina, all cooked with oil from Ukrainian sunflowers and salt from Nepal. These products take complex and inefficient routes, changing hands an average of nine times before they arrive in front of the consumer. The scale is mind-boggling: 500,000 different products from trillions of tons of harvests, all transported across continents. The whole thing is a fragmented maze, a disorganized Frankenstein, held together by millions of quick fixes and spot solutions.

The food supply chain is primarily a “push” market, where producers push supply without clear visibility into market demand. As a result, there is more supply than demand, and buyers use this superior negotiation position to dictate prices. This dynamic eradicates producers’ income and ability to invest in modern food production methods. This disconnect fuels the vicious cycle of overproduction and ultimately, waste.

It has led to an almost complete absence of accountability. Farmers sell to the harvest manager, the harvest manager sells to the broker, the broker to the restaurant owner and so on. Every actor pushes the product to its respective next step, and this is where their responsibility ends. If there’s no demand, the product gets wasted. No one is thinking about the food system as a system, and creating alignment across its various pieces. A significant portion of the sector continues to operate using traditional pen and paper methods, with a very low level of digitalization. This makes it hard for players to make data-driven decisions and makes it even harder to create transparency across the supply chain.

Creating a globally connected digital food system

To comprehensively address these challenges we need to create coherence and collaboration at each level, from farmers and buyers to wholesalers, distributors, brokers, restaurant owners and beyond. Every value-adding business within the food supply chain needs to embrace technology that facilitates waste reduction and cost efficiency through process automation. Transformative measures should extend from leveraging data and AI to revamping back-of-house operations for suppliers, including warehousing, inbound operations, and purchasing.

Happily, there have been a number of new technologies launched in recent years that can help restaurant owners be part of this digital approach to reducing food waste. Several companies offer automated inventory management systems which can help restaurants minimize food loss and waste through more accurate demand forecasting and real-time monitoring of stock levels. When it comes to time to place an order, tools like Choco enable restaurants to streamline the process and avoid the kinds of errors and duplicate orders that lead to waste.

Similarly, tableside and self-ordering technology can help restaurants avoid mistakes that lead to wasted food. New entrants can also help restaurants avoid sending surplus food to landfill. Copia uses an algorithm to match excess food from restaurants and other hospitality businesses with local non-profits and even arranges to have a third-party driver pick it up, while Too Good To Go has created a mobile app that allows consumers to buy leftover, expiring, or missing food at discount prices from local eateries.

Looking towards the future

I’m sure many will find this vision grandiose or even impossible. But the truth is that this is a problem that urgently needs to be solved – both because of the challenges we’re already facing as a result of climate change and also because our food system will have to feed a population of 10 billion by 2050. There is a limit to how much we can expand agricultural land, which means that reducing food waste is imperative.

There is also a strong economic incentive. Recent data found that a 20% reduction in food waste in the restaurant industry could save businesses up to $7 billion annually. And increasingly, there are reputational and competitive reasons for getting food waste under control. According to a 2022 survey of global consumers68% of people believe that restaurants should have processes in place to avoid waste and 43% would pay more for takeout food that is sustainable.

The message is clear. As business leaders, food suppliers, restaurant owners, chefs, or simply consumers, we are all part of the ecosystem and we all have a role to play in cutting down food waste. It’s not just an environmental crusade, it’s smart business as well as an urgent humanitarian need. We can turn this crisis into an opportunity for lasting change. Let’s make the future of food a sustainable one, starting today.

Daniel Khachab is the co-founder and CEO of Choco, an app solving food supply chain inefficiencies by simplifying how restaurants order from suppliers. After starting Ecommerce and SaaS companies from scratch and scaling them to market leadership internationally, Daniel decided to spend his life building Choco to solve one of the most pertinent problems in the world, food waste. Since 2018 Daniel has been building, inspiring and guiding Choco to solve that problem. Today, Choco’s team is just under 200 people strong and spans 2 continents. Prior to Choco, Daniel cut his teeth at Rocket Internet, where he quickly rose to the youngest CEO in their portfolio after scaling several international ventures. Daniel also served a year in the German Air Force. Since graduating from his alma mater, Maastricht University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in International Business and Finance, Daniel has lectured on entrepreneurship and provided guidance for the alumni startup ecosystem, as well as recruiting many alumni to the ranks of Choco.

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Read on for the tech that expires in 2023.

Google Glass Enterprise Edition

(Image: Google)

Among the tech products laid to rest in 2023 was Google’s augmented reality headset Google Glass Enterprise Edition, marking the final nail in the coffin for Google’s visionary but ill-fated foray into AR glasses. First publicly announced in 2012, Google Glass was intended to usher in a new era of wearable computing, giving people working in agricultural, medical, and factory settings a heads-up display that would provide them with information while keeping their hands free. But the $1,500 price tag, lack of clear functionality, and privacy concerns doomed the Explorer Edition among consumers.

Google tried to revive Glass for businesses in 2017 with the Enterprise Edition, sold for $999. The headset found niche adoption in fields such as manufacturing and medicine, where hands-free computing was useful. But ultimately, Google Glass failed to achieve mainstream success or change how we interact with technology day-to-day.

Lenovo’s Legion Gaming Phone Business

(Image: Lenovo)

Rumors about Lenovo shutting down its phone business started flying in at the start of the year. Then in March, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed to Android Authority that it had indeed been shut down. The spokesperson stated that the decision stemmed from “a wider business transformation and gaming portfolio consolidation.”

It seems gaming phones have struggled to carve out a distinct niche as regular flagship phones have gotten better and better at providing great gaming experiences even during long play sessions. Companies tried to attract buyers through gimmicks like cooling fans, RGB lighting and massive amounts of RAM, but to no avail. Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones were well-reviewed devices with top-tier specs, but ultimately couldn’t compete with more mainstream options. The company seems to be shifting focus to handheld gaming devices instead and unveiled the Lenovo Legion Go in September.

The gaming phone market in general seems to be on shaky ground – Xiaomi’s Black Shark division has gone quiet after layoffs in January this year, although brands like ASUS continue to see some success with their ROG Phone series. While they arguably pushed the boundaries of mobile gaming, Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones are yet another piece of tech that won’t pan out in 2023.

Amazon Hello Brand

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Did you know that Amazon has a line of fitness trackers? Probably not. So it didn’t come as a surprise when Amazon decided to pull the plug on its Halo line of health and fitness trackers in July 2023, marking the end of the company’s attempt to break into the wearables market. Launched in 2020, Halo was Amazon’s play into the competitive fitness tracking space dominated by Apple, Fitbit and others. However, it failed to gain significant traction against entrenched rivals.

Halo has three products: the Band, the View, and the Rise. The Band was a basic fitness tracker that was launched in 2020. It has some controversial features, such as measuring body fat with a 3D scan and analyzing voice tone. The View was a smartwatch that came out in 2021. And the Rise was a sleep tracker and alarm clock that was launched recently. The company announced that it would refund customers who bought a Halo device or accessory in the last year, stop charging for the Halo subscription, and delete all the data it had gathered.

Cortana on Windows

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After years of gradually scaling back support, Microsoft discontinued the standalone Cortana app in August 2023, redirecting users to its new Bing Chatbot and AI Copilot features instead. Cortana’s shutdown marks the end of Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Siri and Google Assistant in the voice assistant space.

Originally launched in 2014, Cortana was designed to provide hands-free voice control and predictive information on Windows devices, similar to the capabilities of Apple and Google’s assistants. It expanded to Android, iOS, and Xbox over the next few years. However, Microsoft struggled to get consumers excited about Cortana. Usage remains niche compared to the competition. By 2021, Microsoft had already ended support for the iOS and Android apps, removed Cortana from the Windows taskbar and stripped out most third-party integrations. Its focus shifted to productivity features rather than general assistance.

With new AI chatbots like Bing Chatbot and Copilot taking center stage, Microsoft no longer sees a need for the standalone Cortana app. Its removal streamlines the Windows experience while freeing up resources for Microsoft’s new AI priorities. For now, the original Cortana lives on solely as an AI companion in Microsoft’s Halo videogame franchise.

Microsoft WordPad

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The humble text editor WordPad is finally meeting its demise with Microsoft announcing it will no longer update the app and deprecate it with a future version of Windows. It was included for free on Windows PCs for over 25 years. While never as feature-rich as Word, the no-frills WordPad allowed users to compose documents, edit fonts and formats, and save files as .doc, .rtf or .txt. For students, office workers, and home users alike, WordPad strikes a nice balance between capable and uncomplicated.

But with Word and Notepad improving over the years, Microsoft has decided WordPad’s time has passed. The app was already optional starting in 2020 before its looming removal from Windows was confirmed this September. Though it never had a large user base compared to Word, the soon-to-happen discontinuation of WordPad closes the book on an unassuming yet capable writing tool many grew up using. For those wanting more formatting options, Microsoft suggests its Office suite, while Notepad remains for basic text needs.

Omegle

(Image: Omegle)

The once-popular online chat platform Omegle announced in November that it would be shutting down operations after over a decade of connecting strangers for random conversations. Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks cited financial and psychological unsustainability as reasons for closing the anonymous chat site. Since its launch in 2009, Omegle has become a go-to destination for those seeking random connections online. However, the platform has increasingly become a target for grooming and online abuse despite its original innocent intentions. Short-form video app TikTok even banned sharing Omegle links due to concerns over child safety on the platform.

While Omegle’s anonymous nature allowed for positive cultural exchanges and advice-seeking for some users, the lack of oversight made it difficult to control misuse. After years of fighting uphill battles, Omegle founder K-Brooks decided the platform could no longer bear the attacks and shut it down.

Hyperloop One

(Image: Virgin)

Hyperloop One, the ambitious transportation startup aiming to develop a network of tunnels for levitating pods traveling at speeds up to 760 mph, has ceased operations after nearly a decade of work. Despite raising over $400 million in funding and demonstrating a working prototype, the company was ultimately unable to secure any customers for its futuristic vision of transportation. After layoffs in 2022 and the withdrawal of investment from Sir Richard Branson, Hyperloop One was simply unable to sustain itself financially. The company’s assets, including its test track in Las Vegas, will be liquidated as its story comes to an end on December 31, 2023.