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”: https://www.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

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