Velkommen til Lørn.Tech – en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn med Silvija Seres og venner. 

Silvija Seres: Hello and welcome to Lørn in collaboration with NITO, the Norwegian association for engineers and technologists. Our topic today is BIGDATA, and a few other things as well, and my guest is Charlotte Aschim, who has founded a software company called TotalCtrl, welcome. 

Charlotte Aschim: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. 

Silvija: It’s a pleasure to have you again, Charlotte. We spoke once before in Lørn, and it was one of the most memorable episodes that we have made, so I really look forward to this chat again.

Charlotte: Oh, nice!

Silvija: So, you are a founder of a company that focuses on less food-waste, but across the board and you work both with consumers and corporates, businesses?

Charlotte: Businesses. So, kind of the vision for the company is to prevent food-waste throughout the entire vouching. Currently we work with most businesses, consumer-facing businesses, such as grocery stores and hotels and restaurants. We also have many cupalites and foodbanks as our customers, but we help them prevent food waste and make sure that their operations are more efficient. 

Silvija: So, we’ll go back to that, I would like you to tell us a little bit about who Charlotte is and what drives her. I just have to describe you because people can’t see you. You have the most memorable hair dye I have ever seen in my life, it is azure-blue, and big, and you are going all in in being a founder that people will associate and remember for the work they do. So, tell us more about yourself. 

Charlotte: So basically, and pretty quickly, I am 31 years old, born and raised in Trondheim, middle of Norway. I have masters-degree within land management, but I worked a lot in construction industry, flying drones, and building bridges in 3D, and stuff like that. I was working in a grocery store during my studies which will kind of ease us into the fact that I started TotalCtrl, but I learnt how to code via YouTube, and I appreciate learning new stuff, and learning from others, and that’s kind of the base of who I am.

Silvija: And what made you decide to become an entrepreneur?

Charlotte: I think I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I kind of went good-girl route, so I got the apartment, got the car, got the salary, got the education, all those things, and I came to a point where that was fine, but I didn’t learn.  

Silvija: It didn’t fulfill you.

Charlotte: No, so I needed more, and I’ve always had a lot of ideas, and TotalCtrl was started based on food-waste for extended experience, where I could see a solution that I just started building on my own, and it quickly turned into a business, so it was by half-accident, but also by a strong wish to do something more than just to be normal.

Silvija: Yeah. My experience with entrepreneurship is that you know if you want to try to figure out who is going to be successful, you can talk all you want about product-market faith and you can talk about you know, quality of people etcetera, but, really, if you have somebody there who is passionate about solving a particular problem and has somewhat of a pedigree in delivery, I think you can get pretty far. And so, you were passionate about food-waste, so what’s the measurable part of that? What’s the problem, and how do you think you can solve it? 

Charlotte: So, when it comes to food-waste, first of all, we waste one third of all the food that we produce, which is major. So, it’s a global problem, and one of the issues with food-waste is the lack of control over expiration dates for example. A lot of food is wasted due to expiration dates. 

Silvija: Because you think it’s bad, but it is not.

Charlotte: Yes, and a lot of us think of it as quality marked, but it’s actually just something that, you can eat more stuff that has the date, best before, so nothing is dangerous, nothing is health dangerous.

Silvija: Might even be good for us sometimes.

Charlotte: So, it’s a lack of knowledge around it.

Silvija: Right.

Charlotte: And as well as when it comes to dealing with food and handling food, you see when you go deeper and deeper into the food industry that a lot of the things are done manually still. So, for example, when I worked in a grocery store, I had to go manually around the grocery store isles, look for food that was about to expire or had expired, and I had to kind of. 

Silvija: You had to find the brown bananas.

Charlotte: Yes, exactly. And then I had to register them out, and it was a cumbersome and manual process.

Silvija: So, how do we improve on this?

Charlotte: First of all, I think technology is a great way of improving it, and just making sure that manual routines that take a long time to perform is fixed somewhat by technology.

Silvija: So, you can have an iPad with a list of things that should be past sell-by-date, and you clean them out in a more structured way. Is that an idea?

Charlotte: Yeah, so, what we do until the control is that we make sure that manual routines are now digital, meaning for example the routine I described in terms of walking through the isle. Instead of doing that as a manual routine, now the employees of the store has total control over what’s in the store based on expiration date, making it faster for them to go to the exact product and discount it or sell it faster, or do some pro-active cultivation to make sure that food-waste is prevented and that sales are going upwards, not decreasing prices and so on.

Silvija: Very cool. In order to do some of this, you said you learned to code. What do you code? I mean what problem do you solve with coding?

Charlotte: So, that was the main problem. So, what I started coding was just a list based on expiration date, a product list, based on expiration date.

Silvija: For one store at the time?

Charlotte: Yeah, so, that gave notification prior to things expiring, making sure that people were actually able to do something before the date was a problem.

Silvija: What’s the experience of learning to code through YouTube?

Charlotte: It was easier than I thought.

Silvija: How did you do it? Where does one start?

Charlotte: I googled, so, I googled: “how to learn how to code”, and I found something, I just started easy things like a flashlight and stuff like that, and then built kind of results, made sure that I was able to build something that was useable, and it went pretty quickly. So, yeah, I would suggest, everybody should learn how to code, and YouTube is a way to do it.

Silvija: If you know how to read or write a recipe, write a recipe, you know how to read or write a code. You just need to learn the kind of language involved, right? 

Charlotte: Yes.

Silvija: So, you started TotalCtrl when? 

Charlotte: December 2017. 

Silvija: Okay.

Charlotte: So, we’re less than two years old.

Silvija: And where are you know with the company?

Charlotte: So, we’re in, I would say growth-stage, which means, we’ve gone from two people to now fifteen people. We have multiple customers, we are earning more money than we’re spending, and we are scaling outside of Norway and the Nordics, so that’s fun. So, I think we have done a lot of good things in a short amount of time, but we still need to do even more.

Silvija: And you’re saying that you’re doing this not only for end-consumers, but also for businesses.  

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: So, what’s the business-side and what’s the business model? 

Charlotte: So, for the businesses, we simplify their everyday-routines, when it comes to handling food, so for example for, let’s say restaurants, currently when they get the food delivered to the restaurant, all they do is print out a piece of paper which has the ordering information and then use pen and paper to cross out what has been delivered, and then they have inventory count at the end of the month, meaning they have no control over what goes in and out of the storage during the month, making the inventory count a cumbersome and long routine. What we do for restaurants for example is just to digitalize the inventory count, making sure that they can register in and out the items, and also have control over the item’s expiration date, so that we are giving them real time inventory control, based on the expiration date.  

Silvija: And I guess the better you know what you have, the bigger chance you have to actually use it.

Charlotte: Yes

Silvija: Many times, we simply don’t use our stuff because we don’t know that we have it or where it is.

Charlotte: Yeah, so we see that the fact that they have better control helps a lot. So, it helps their planning process, it helps the purchasing process, and it helps the use-process.

Silvija: Do you have any measurable improvements?

Charlotte: So, yeah, for our first costumer that we spent the majority of our development with, we managed to reduce the time that they spend on inventory by 50%, so we’re half the time within the four first months that we had our solution there. We also reduced a lot of food-waste, so, around 62% of food-waste was reduced, because of having control over inventory means that you are able to turn the items over faster, sell it, and purchase more accurately.

Silvija: I see. And there is, I imagine for you know series of restaurants, this becomes relatively quickly bigdata, there is a lot of it?

Charlotte: Yes. So, the more information that you kind of have from the very start that you have all the information about the products that you have in, the more data you can use in terms of the entire, let’s say circular economy of running a restaurant. And when it comes to allergies, when it comes to any health-information, we can also kind of combine that with inventory information, recipe information, and that’s something valuable for restaurants and business owner, because then they can plan better for next year. They can predict better, they can purchase better, it is so connected, so getting control at the first level, inventory, helps a lot when it comes to running a more sustainable business. 

Silvija: I know nothing about restaurant business, how is their cost divided between their, you know input materials, the food, and the other costs. Is it an important part? 

Charlotte: Yeah, so, when it comes to the purchasing cost.

Silvija: Cost of goods.

Charlotte: Cost of goods. If you’re a good restaurant, it’s between 28% and if you’re not that good, you’re upwards around 40%, and by getting better control, you automatically reduce that cost. 

Silvija: And the goods are more fresh when you get to use them, which probably does taste better as well.

Charlotte: Yeah, that helps with customer loyalty, so the benefits out to the guest is helpful in that way as well. 

Silvija: You have worked on a particular project in Halden. Can you say more about that?

Charlotte: So, the Halden project is fairly new, we just started that project. It is a project where we’ll make Halden the world’s best municipality when it comes to food-waste reduction. So that is interesting. 

Silvija: This is a publicly driven project?

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: It’s the municipality, or?

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: Which is really interesting I think that they have such hairy goals and try to solve them practically.

Charlotte: Yeah, so we see because of the smart city projects that almost every municipality has now. They have one KPI, which is more on food waste which is great, and we are under that kind of category, and Halden is in the front in terms of making sure that they can do any digital solutions when it comes to preventing and reducing food-waste in the municipality.

Silvija: So how do you think that you will do that?

Charlotte: So, what we’ll start with is, there is a project phase for this, so we will start with mapping certain players in the municipality. So, what we will start with now is the health clinics, the kindergartens and the schools.

Silvija: And track their food chain basically?

Charlotte: Yeah, so we make sure we know which suppliers they’re using, what kind of food that comes in and what goes out and give them a control over what they purchase and what they have and how they can use it, so that they will also have a more seer cost-reduction and see more accurate purchasing and so on, and a reduction in food-waste of course.

 
Silvija: You have also two other projects I’d like you to comment on, one is Handleriet.no and the other one is Matsentralen in Oslo. 

Charlotte: Yes. So, Handleriet was an online grocery store. So, what we helped them with was primarily making an app for their online business, making sure that their customers could order food through the app, get the food delivered at home, and then get all the food in the app sorted by expiration date, get notifications prior to things expiring, and then automatically generating recipes based on what they have at home. Because one of the things that we do, and have done just under those two years that we’ve been alive is that we have created one of Norway’s biggest digital recipe-banks, which we can combine to any inventory, meaning that we can combine the restaurant’s menus to their inventory, and other leftover recipes to inventory, so we used that also to make sure that food-waste is prevented and reduced, as well as making sure that everybody knows how to use their food.

Silvija: Here is my bad conscious speaking: every week, I have to toss a few brown bananas and every week I say: next week I’m going to have that banana-bread recipe ready, and it never is ready, so now I’ll check you out actually. What about Matsentralen?

Charlotte: So, Matsentralen Oslo is one of the foodbanks in Norway, and the foodbanks are doing great jobs, a great job kind of handing out food to charities. One of their challenges is that they’re using a lot of pen and paper to do their routines, meaning when suppliers come in and deliver food, they use pen and paper to write every food-item that comes in, to the foodbank.

Silvija: These foodbanks, they get food-extras from shops, restaurants?

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: And then they give it to charities, or even directly to people, or how does that work?

Charlotte: So, they give it to charities. So, there are few foodbanks that give it to single-person people, so you have to be connected to one of the charities.

Silvija: And then red-cross would use these to help the homeless, or?

Charlotte: Yes, so the charities will hand it over to the single people, and then, yeah so they get the surplus food from the suppliers which could be products that has expired or just campaigns that are done, so they are not able to be sold in the grocery stores anymore, and there could be wrong labelings, so there could be different reasons for the foodbank getting the food, but they get it from the suppliers and then they have a storage where they have everything, and then the charities come buy and pick up what they need. So, what we help them with there is actually just digitalizing their manual routines when it comes to pen and paper use, so making sure that they have total control over their inventory based on expiration dates as well.

Silvija: So, we haven’t really spoken about internet of things and sensors, but I imagine that’s coming in, into what you’re doing.

Charlotte: Yes. 

Silvija: How?

Charlotte: So, we have looked a lot into sensor-technology in terms of making our software even more automatic, but what we struggle with is to find sensors that are good enough to combine with our software. We are a software-company so we don’t want to do the hard-work-part, but we can easily connect our software to hardware, so let’s say if sensors are placed in the doorway when a palette of food comes in, and the sensor is able to register everything that is on the palette, our software can harvest that data and do our magic to make it easy for the employees to deal with it.

Silvija: So, it has to do a lot with tagging of data? And, or the goods, basically.

Charlotte: Yes, and at the moment there is no tagging of products, so there is no RFID coding on products in wide range of products, so there is still a lot of work that has to be done for that to be applicable. So, it’s coming, and we’re seeing that it’s coming, we will also play it around with QR-codes, which is simpler than putting RFID into stuff, but it’s not there yet.

Silvija: I think the problem is that these codes are not produced in a way that you know gives them these hierarchical, you know, that’s a particular box in a bigger box in a, you know, a bigger crate, and figuring out enough information in that code. There is a Norwegian company called Kessler, and they are really, really good at creating that information, so the question is: how do you connect, and how do you get their tags on enough stuff, that it starts making sense.

Charlotte: Yes, exactly. And they are doing a great job, so the more they get that information from the very start, the better, because then the data flows from the very start until the end consumer, and kind of the information goes in circle.

Silvija: Is there an advantage of doing this in Norway? 

Charlotte: I would say Norway is a good place to do technology. We’re good in technology, and we have a lot of great people here. It’s a great testing ground if you get into somewhere to test it, and it’s a great place to start a company, it’s fairly,

Silvija: Easy.

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: We complain, but it’s much easier then in most other parts of the world.

Charlotte: Yeah, I totally agree. So, we should be lucky that we have those grants that we have from Innovation Norway, and a lot of support in SkatteFUNN and stuff like that. Of course, the salaries are higher and stuff here, but it’s still easier than other places.

Silvija: Total risk is smaller perhaps.

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: Do you look up to Amazon?

Charlotte: Yeah.

Silvija: What are the best ideas that you like, or how do you think about them?

Charlotte: So, I like the way that they innovate quickly, like Amazon Go is something that we inspire for more information around. They have managed to do a lot of good things with the use of technology and connecting it more and more to the food industry is major as well. So yeah, they are good.

Silvija: So we’ve learned that you learned to code by going on YouTube, how did you learn to be an entrepreneur?

Charlotte: I started out googling, and that would be the easy answer, but I started out watching a lot of shows and videos, so one of them was Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den and a lot of pitching competitions, just to get understanding of what it takes, how to communicate easily to the people that may be, to investors, to the customers, and make sure that, yeah, that was extremely good learning, just to get a perspective on how to communicate, because that could be hard and we struggled with that from the very start as well, how to communicate as simple as possible. When you’re in your bubble it’s always hard because you think everybody knows what you know, but that’s not the case. So, watching a lot of tv-shows, talking to a lot of people that has done it before, asking for a lot of advice, and not a lot of people have told me “no” when I’ve asked them for advice, so that’s been extremely valuable.

Silvija: People want to help if you ask in a nice way. Do you have a quote or a motto that we could leave to our listeners?

Charlotte: Yes.

Silvija: And you can say it in Norwegian, because it’s very much you in Norwegian.

Charlotte: Yeah, I would say it’s better to say it in Norwegian. So, I would say one of the quotes that I use the most in everyday life is: “Det ordner seg alltid, du må bare jobbe hardt for det.”

Silvija: Everything works out in the end as long as you work your ass of for it, or something like that. It’s very strange to look at people who have succeeded you know, and we think overnight-success, and we always forget that it’s a ten-year warmup for an overnight-success, and we keep forgetting those ten or twenty years that people have worked day and night to get to the success that they have achieved, but it’s worth it, no?

Charlotte: Yeah, I would say, I am blessed by the fact that my mother wanted me to work from an early age, so I started working from twelve, and that gave me kind of mentality around work which really has helped in terms of building a company, so yeah, I would say the work-experience from early stage helps when it comes to building a company, or anything else as well.

Silvija: We spoke about many things, and what would you like, if there was one thing for people to remember, what would you like it to be?

Charlotte: I would say, maybe go back to the quote in terms of that if you work hard enough, you will make it, you just have to put in the work, and it’s, when it comes to big problems like for example what we’re tackling, like food-waste, make sure that you figure out simple solutions, don’t make it too complex. Start with the simple things, and really understand what your clients need, and not what you want to make, but what your clients need and will pay for. I think that is some advice that I would give in terms of if you want to make a business fly faster and make your clients happy. 

Silvija: Charlotte Aschim, the last time we spoke, it was very much about cleantech and food-waste, and climate and such. This time we talked much more about growing your business, being an entrepreneur, and you know, putting data into the circularity concept, and I think it’s really impressive to see how you grow this business and how you develop it, and how you also change both in the perception of private and public sector of what’s possible and how quickly.

Charlotte: Thank you!

Silvija: Thanks for your good work and thank you for listening.

Du har lyttet til en podkast fra Lørn.Tech – en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn. Følg oss i sosiale medier og på våre nettsider, Lørn.Tech.