Hayley BanceProduct Design & Strategy Leader
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01StreamLine

From food waste tracking to production intelligence

We started by helping kitchens see what they were wasting. We built toward a system that helped them decide what to do next.

Company
Topanga
Product
Smart scale, dashboard, email, integrations
Discipline
Product strategy, systems, hardware, service design
The StreamLine smart scale: a weighing platform with a touchscreen, and a camera mounted on an arm above it

Kitchens knew food waste was a problem. They just couldn’t see how big it was, or what was driving it.

StreamLine started with a goal to make food waste data easier to capture.

02   One task impacted two jobsOperators and chefs

One task impacted two jobs.

Food waste passed through two sets of hands. Operators captured it in the middle of a busy shift, and chefs and managers used it to plan. We had to understand and design for both.

Operator

Track it. Move on.

Chef / manager

Make sense of the data.

Chef / managerMake sense of the data.OperatorTrack it. Move on.

Plan

Prepare & serve

Waste & store

Record

Reflect

03   We made capture foolproofThe first product decision

We made capture foolproof.

Computer vision, menu integration, and a smart scale narrowed each observation to the relevant menu item and reduced manual entry.

The MVP scale with a pan of fried chicken on it; its touchscreen shows 12.2 lbs and a single Food Waste button
The MVP: waste capture with a single tap.
An operator in a university dining kitchen weighing a pan of onion rings on the StreamLine scale, with more pans staged on a cart
In the kitchen with operators.

The pilot tested whether we could make capture easy enough that operators would use it consistently and chefs would trust the resulting data.The pilot

04   The research changed the productThe pivot

Operators used the scale. Chefs trusted the data. But chefs needed more data to actually reduce waste.

05   Building the system around the workflowStreamLine 2.0

Building the system around the workflow.

The product expanded from only capturing waste into a system that created transparency across the food production lifecycle.

StreamLine 2.0

Every production type—prepared, carryover, and waste—on one screen.

Hardware

Capture production data where it happens.

The StreamLine scale: a stainless platform on a camera arm, with a tilted touchscreen offering Prepared, Carryover, and Waste

Dashboard

Create transparency into what is happening.

The StreamLine dashboard observation log: prepared, carryover, and waste totals above photo cards of each weighed item

Email

Bring attention to relevant information.

A StreamLine weekly waste report email: total waste this week, a waste monitor, and a chart of pounds wasted per week

Integrations

Connect insights back to operational systems.

5integrations across menu management systems
06   From data to actionThe next product problem
2M+ lbsproduction data captured
10×faster data capture
3×higher team compliance

We had the data. Now we needed to help chefs use it.

We identified the weekly planning moment as the opportunity. Chefs already reviewed what happened in the kitchen before planning the week ahead.

We built an AI recommendation model that surfaced the production issues most worth their attention, along with a suggested action. We tested it with chefs in a pilot program.

Weekly recommendation cards, such as reducing portions of a menu item by 20 to 30 percent, each with the waste observed over the last four weeks
Weekly recommendations
3–5 recommendations surfaced the production issues most worth acting on.
87.5%of flagged items showed waste reduction
31.1%reduction across flagged items

The pilot showed that the recommendation model we had built could help chefs make real changes to their bottom line. Continue to the AI-native dashboard case study to see how we built this into the dashboard experience.