Photo credit: Callum Bennetts, Maverick Photo Agency
What is the mission of Remy?
At Remy, we are on a mission to reduce avoidable household food waste by 70 per cent across Europe. By leveraging AI, we are helping our users effortlessly understand what’s in their kitchen, when it expires, and how they can use it while offering the option to buy what’s missing, directly from their smartphones. We like to say that we’re helping our users buy what they need and cook what they buy.
In doing so, Remy collects novel user emissions and behaviour data to drastically improve corporate partners’ Scope 3 emissions reporting (mandatory in Europe in 2025), commercial strategies and waste mitigation efforts.
As a result, we’re not only helping to reduce food waste, the third-largest cause of CO2 emissions worldwide, but we are also helping our users save a lot of money and time.
What inspired you to launch the business?
Jake and I used to live together while studying in Edinburgh, and nearly every day, we’d come home to find some new item rotting in our fridge that we had to throw away; to be honest, it was disgusting and made us feel very guilty.
This was a result of not knowing what we had in our fridge and when it was expiring, aimlessly buying things that we didn’t need – or already had at home – having no idea what to make with the variety of ingredients that we ended up buying, and finally, a lack of time to manage our kitchen sustainably.
As such we did some first-hand research into the issue, and once we found out the daunting amount of pollution that is caused by household food waste, we set out to build Remy.
How have your studies at the Business School helped you?
First and foremost, studying at the Business School gave us the entrepreneurial spirit to not only notice the problem, but to sit down and try to find an impact-driven solution that could affect millions.
It also gave us the analytical and empirical skills we needed to take a data-driven approach to identifying the problem, validating our solutions, and iterating effectively to find product/market fit as early as possible.
Lastly, and this goes without saying, it gave us the foundation knowledge we needed to formulate a detail-oriented and scalable business plan.
How has the wider University supported you?
In a nutshell, we would not be where we are today if it weren’t for the Business School and Edinburgh Innovations (EI). The entire team at EI has believed in us and supported us from day one, giving us the grant funding we needed to build our minimum viable product, and they continue to support us every step of the way.
The help was not solely from a financial perspective though. The entire support staff has continuously challenged our ideas and given us critical feedback where necessary to make sure that we are always reaching our full potential. I cannot say clearly enough that we would not be here without them.
We were delighted to be named as one of the finalists in the Growth Innovation category at EI’s ‘Inspire Launch Grow awards’ in June 2024. It was inspiring to meet or reconnect with the other finalists and to learn of their truly outstanding business ventures.
Photo credit: Callum Bennetts, Maverick Photo Agency
What key things that you learnt on your degree, do you still rely on today?
On top of the hard skills mentioned above, I believe some of the most valuable lessons I gained during my degree were how they shaped me as a person, both on a personal and professional level. These include perseverance, discipline, healthy competition, communication, and attention to detail.
Throughout my four years at the School, the various practically-oriented projects and essays did a great job of re-enacting real life professional situations, and truly prepared me for what life would be like in the ‘real’ world. I rely on these skills earned in Edinburgh on a daily basis and continue developing them as best as I can.
What’s next for the business, and where do you see your business in five years?
We are currently going to market and will be launching in the UK by the end of the summer. From there, we have plans to expand further into continental Europe over the next three years and then make the move to the US, where I am originally from.
In five years, our goal is to harness the potential of AI to ensure that every household in Europe is impacted by Remy in some form or another. We have ambitious plans that include hardware innovations, licensing models, and fully automated kitchen management - among others - to make sure that avoidable household food waste production is a thing of the past!