Better Business From Dumpster Diving

When Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owner Bill Mulholland wanted to reduce costs, he took a closer look at his garbage. About a year ago, he got a deal on a $400-a-month bio-digester—a commercial, dishwasher-size steel box filled with bacteria that converts food waste into sewage—from BioHiTech, a maker of the machines. Mulholland, who’d heard about the digester from a friend, also liked the idea of helping the environment by cutting down on garbage. Besides shaving a bit off his $550 monthly trash-hauling costs, the web-connected machine provides Mulholland with information to help him better run his business. “If we don’t have enough waste running through the machine, I know we don’t have enough product,” he says. “If we have too much, we are overbaking. I really can see from afar if my store managers are doing a good job.”

Extracting information from garbage was just what Frank Celli, the chief executive officer of BioHiTech, was after when he and his team devised a way to make the machines smart. “It occurred to me that waste was valuable,” says Celli, who as a teenager worked in his family’s garbage-hauling business in New York’s Hudson Valley. He could tell a lot about customers from their trash.