Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive: Emily Ma on Solving Food Waste

In the ninth installment of the Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, Astro Teller and Emily Ma explore how to solve humanity’s food waste and hunger problems.

They discuss how Project Delta built an “air traffic control” system for the world’s surplus food. They also discuss the origins of Chorus, X’s moonshot to give every object a voice which is now focused on optimizing global supply chains using advanced sensors and orchestration software.

For more on the future of food waste, tune into Episode 6 of the Moonshot Podcast, “Trash to Treasure”: youtube.com/watch?v=WgRASA92Dco

Video Segmentation
00:00 - Introduction
01:38 - The origins of Emily’s passion for food waste
04:07 - Why food waste is such a big problem
07:09 - How Emily wound up at X
10:24 - Google Glass in early food waste prototypes
12:06 - Emily’s “waste audit” sifting through physical trash
15:08 - How food is wasted in every phase of the production process
20:36 - An “air traffic control” system for the world’s surplus food
23:54 - How X’s food waste technology helped tackle that surplus
29:25 - What the team learned by working in the field
30:40 - Food waste “nodes” to reroute surplus food
33:34 - Applying X’s food waste technology outside the U.S.
35:41 - The team’s early vision for a supply chain moonshot - Chorus
39:56 - How Chorus evolved from the Delta team
41:26 - How Delta graduated to Google
45:06 - Emily’s fondest moonshot memories
46:54 - The importance of play when taking moonshots

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices