With growing consciousness around food waste, many are choosing a lifestyle that prevents surplus production as well as misuse of food and related resources. A pioneer for this cause is Somdip Dey, a 31-year-old from Kolkata, India, who is changing the way people interact with food with his company Nosh Technologies.
Somdip Dey's journey to the spotlight has been far from easy and he has undergone both professional as well as personal trouble to reach the spot he now occupies. In particular, it was in 2014 when Dey first became determined to lead a healthy and more environmentally conscious lifestyle. What brought this on was a car accident his parents got embroiled in which sapped all of Dey's life savings. At the time Somdip Dey who was still a student was forced to gather and consume food from dumpsters to survive while all his money was spent on his parents' medical treatment. After the period of the financial crisis was over Dey decided to do something fruitful with his acquaintance with food waste and in the end of 2014, he co-developed an open-source application that would connect those with food surplus to those who needed it.
This open source web application was built in collaboration with Codeepy, a hackathon team from the University of Manchester, U.K., inspiring many other entrepreneurs to take a look into the food waste situation, while also winning the 3Scale API award at the 2014 Koding Global Virtual Hackathon. After finishing his Masters in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Manchester Dey went on to gain experience in the role of a professional software engineer and topped it off with a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Essex. Considering his past background as a socially aware and knowledgeable individual it took Dey no time to connect the dots and build a career developing technologies which integrate blockchain and artificial intelligence to prevent food waste and promote a more environmentally friendly food supply chain. It was in 2020 during the pandemic that Dey took the next big step in his career and launched the Nosh app, which is an artificial intelligence powered food management app that reduces food waste at home, with another computer engineer from Kolkata, Suman Saha.
Under Dey's guidance and leadership, Nosh has spread its wings to go from just an application to a whole movement against food waste. Dey and Saha also co-founded Nosh Technologies based on the app. Presently, Nosh has three services under its brand name– Nosh Food Management, which manages food to be consumed fresh before expiring; Nosh Daily, which talks about the latest news and events in the food industry, and Nosh Shop, a venture which will allow restaurants and other food vendors to sell food with a close expiration date at a discounted rate. As of now the Nosh app is available in 176 countries and has more than 13,000 users. With this creative initiative, the Nosh team has been able to save more than 145,000 food items that would otherwise go to waste and saved up on upwards of 78 tons of carbon dioxide emission.
