One Bin, Three Stories: Anastasia Dellis on Turning Kitchen Waste Into Action

What if a restaurant kitchen bin could talk?

Not complain, just tell you the truth: what went in, how much, and why. That's roughly what Orbisk has built, and in this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane sits down with its CEO, Anastasia Dellis, to talk through what happens once a commercial kitchen actually starts listening to its own waste.

From retail and quick commerce to food waste

Dellis didn't build the technology herself, she stepped into it. She joined Orbisk about a year and a half ago, brought in by investors after Olaf van der Veen, the founder, decided he wanted to keep dreaming up new frontiers for the business rather than run it day to day. Her own route there is a nice story in itself: two decades moving between corporate retail in Africa and China and the sheer velocity of Gorillas, the quick-commerce company that opened nine markets in six months on a billion euros of funding. 

But what really pulled her towards food waste was more personal than professional. She grew up between South Africa and Greece, in a family that ran a corner café, and she talks about food scarcity and natural abundance sitting side by side there in a way that clearly still shapes how she sees the problem. Meeting Olaf, she says, "was an instant match, complete alignment."

Designing for a kitchen that has no time to spare

You can feel that same instinct in how the hardware itself was designed. A kitchen is already a fast paced, high pressure place to work, and the last thing anyone needs is one more thing to log or check. So Orbisk built a camera and scale that sit above the bin and quietly do the checking instead. It picks up what's discarded, the type of container, whether it's a full tray or plate waste, and it recognises well over 800 different ingredient labels as they go past. 

Dellis has a lovely way of describing the capture moment, comparing it to an iPhone Live Photo: something gets thrown away, the camera catches it, and nobody's touched a thing. She calls the feature "no pause dispose," and honestly, the name says it all. The only thing anyone in the kitchen needs to remember is to use that one bin.

Even with the friction stripped right out, it took a while for people to trust it. Dellis is refreshingly honest about this: early on, staff would wonder if they were being watched, or worried they'd get in trouble for whatever they'd thrown away. What helped was simply saying the quiet part out loud, that everyone in that kitchen wants the same thing, for good food and good margin to stop ending up in the same place. Once that clicks, there's nothing left to train and nothing to remember. She reaches for a comparison Barry clearly enjoys: a fridge, or an oven. Nobody thinks of those as technology they have to manage. They're just there, doing their job in the background.

The bar most technology doesn't clear

It's worth asking how much of the technology we use every day gets this backwards. Most of it doesn't remove work, it just relocates it, swapping one task for a different one wearing a shinier interface. A new dashboard to check. A new app to remember to open. Orbisk is a rare example of a tool that actually disappears into the work it's meant to support, rather than sitting on top of it demanding attention. That's a far higher bar than most product teams even try to clear.

One bin, three very different audiences

Here's where the conversation gets really interesting, though, because collecting the waste data was never really the point. The same bin tells three completely different stories depending on who's reading it. A chef wants to know what's going out and how to stop it. A CFO wants to see the margin impact. A sustainability team wants carbon and water figures they can slot straight into an audit. Hand all three of them the same spreadsheet and none of them get what they actually need. 

So the Orbisk dashboard reshapes the same underlying capture for each of them, and for chefs specifically, it goes further still, through what Dellis calls an AI culinary assistant. Say five kilograms of bread goes in the bin on a Monday. Rather than just flagging the number, the system suggests turning it into croutons, or tweaks a production run, or flags a training point for the team, shaped around that particular kitchen's own brand standards. All the chef has to do is accept or reject the suggestion.

Measuring at scale

"You can't manage what you don't measure," Dellis says, quick to admit the line isn't hers, though it's clearly become something of a personal motto. What's striking is how far Orbisk pushes past the measuring part. Every monitor deployed feeds a machine learning model that's now learning from kitchens across more than 55 countries, including brands like Marriott, Accor, Hilton, IHG and Carnival Cruise Lines. Regulation is starting to lend a hand too. Dellis points to Spain, where every commercial kitchen has had to have a food waste monitoring system in place since the start of this year.

A lighter option for smaller kitchens

For kitchens too small to justify a full Orbi monitor, there's a lighter version called Orbi Light, an app where someone snaps a photo and adds a note by hand. It's not nothing, it does ask a small step of the person using it, which the flagship product deliberately avoids. But Dellis puts it in context: most small kitchens are already tracking waste with pen, paper, a scale, and someone typing it all into a spreadsheet later. A photo that uploads itself is still a real step up from that.

Where this goes next

Where she wants to take this next ties the whole conversation together nicely. Right now, a chef still has to look at the dashboard and choose whether to act on a suggestion. Her longer-term hope is to remove that decision too, feeding the data straight into forecasting and purchasing so a kitchen simply buys differently next time, without anyone having to ask it to. 

Whether that's realistic at real scale is anyone's guess for now. But it's a good reminder of what this whole conversation keeps circling back to: the hard part was never the camera. It was building something a busy kitchen would use without ever really noticing, and then making sure what it learns actually reaches the right person, in a shape they can do something with.

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🎧 Listen to and read the full conversation with Anastasia Dellis on HappyPorch Radio, or find Orbisk at https://orbisk.com/