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Panoramic view on the North Campus © Jürgen Huhn​/​TU Dortmund
Award-Winning Project at EDIH-DO

Using AI to Reduce Food Waste

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Vier Personen bei Preisverleihung auf einer Bühne © European Digital Innovation Hubs Network
At the award ceremony in Brussels, Maria Beck and Kamar Aden (2nd and 3rd from left, both heads of EDIH-DO) accepted the award from Lucilla Sioli (left, Director of the EU AI Office).
Meals prepared and delivered by large-scale kitchens or caterers that are never eaten are a widespread problem. To reduce food waste, a team from the Chair of Mathematical Statistics and Industrial Applications led by Professor Markus Pauly has developed an AI-powered forecasting and planning tool that is already being used successfully by project partner Stattküche. In early June, the transfer project “AI Instead of Waste” was honored in Brussels with the European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH) Network Award for Excellence.

The catering service Stattküche in Münster produces around 22,000 portions of lunch every day, delivering them to schools and nurseries. A portion of pre-ordered meals, however, is regularly not collected, because cancellations arrive too late or are forgotten entirely. For hygiene reasons, this food usually has to be disposed of.

Therefore, in collaboration with the Center for Entrepreneurship and Transfer (CET) at TU Dortmund University and Stattküche, Dr. Ina Dormuth and Professor Markus Pauly developed a forecasting approach using Artificial Intelligence (AI), so that production can be flexibly adjusted to actual daily demand. To achieve this, they first processed extensive historical order data and combined it with parameters such as public holidays, weather conditions, and data on influenza waves. They then tested various statistical and machine learning approaches, ultimately designing a tool that analyses historical order patterns and supports future portion planning by predicting expected cancellations as precisely as possible. In this way, food waste is to be reduced, resources used more effectively, and costs lowered. The digital application has since been integrated into Stattküche’s daily workflows and supports the large-scale kitchen in its decision-making in a transparent, data-driven manner.

Methodologically Sound and Practically Applicable

The challenge for the project team lay in developing an approach that was both methodologically sound and practically applicable: How can one learn from past order and cancellation patterns? How can different forecasting methods be compared? And how can the results be made usable for people who plan meals on a daily basis? “Our goal was to deploy scientific methods in such a way that they genuinely help in the everyday running of a large-scale kitchen. The award shows that data-driven solutions can make a concrete contribution to greater sustainability,” says Professor Markus Pauly of the Department of Statistics, who is also a researcher at the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security of the University Alliance Ruhr. Dr. Ina Dormuth, who carried out the core analytical work as a former doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at Professor Pauly’s chair, has been working as a Data Scientist in the Research and Development department of the Wilo Group since 2026.

The project “AI Instead of Waste” was supported by the European Digital Innovation Hub Dortmund (EDIH-DO). This consortium, with the participation of CET and TU concept GmbH, helps small and medium-sized enterprises to expand their digital competencies and to implement transfer projects from research into practice. The Hub is co-financed by the EU and forms part of the network of European Digital Innovation Hubs.

The “EDIH Network Award for Excellence 2026” was presented in early June at the EDIH Summit in Brussels. With its innovative approach, its tangible impact, and its transferability to other fields of application, the EDIH-DO and “AI Instead of Waste” were able to prevail over the two other finalists. A total of 69 projects had been submitted.

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