Frequently asked questions

Variance reports tell you how much waste left the site, not where it happened, what it cost, or what to do about it, so your best people spend hours assembling that picture by hand. Zest turns your existing data into waste by line, stage and run, priced in pounds, and ranks the changes worth making. Your team spends its time cutting the biggest losses instead of building the report.

Messy, scattered records are exactly where the biggest losses hide. Zest pulls together the digital records you keep today, spreadsheets included, into one costed waste picture. Where the numbers do not reconcile, that gap is itself a finding, and often the first pound of waste you recover.

Neither your MES nor your inspection line was built to show what waste costs you across the whole process; one records output, the other catches defects in the moment. Zest reads from both, joins them to your production and waste records, and shows the full cost of every loss and where to cut it.

General industrial-AI platforms are built to fit any factory, so they arrive as a blank canvas your team has to configure to a food or drink process, and they tend to measure output and defects rather than waste and its cost. Zest is built for food and drink manufacturing, and starts from the losses that matter on your lines, priced in pounds. You get a waste picture shaped around how your site actually runs, not a general analytics tool with a food label added.

Flagging that waste happened is the easy part, and it leaves your team to work out the cause. Zest joins your production, materials and waste records so each loss is traced back to the line, stage and run it came from, and the conditions around it, so you can see what is driving it, not just that it occurred. Zest Correct then ranks the changes worth making, costed, so the answer comes with what to do about it.

You stay in control. Zest surfaces ranked, costed interventions and shows the reasoning behind each one, but your production and line managers decide what to act on and when. Nothing changes on your line without your team, so you get the benefit of the analysis while the judgement stays with the people who know the process.

Less than most teams expect. Zest needs your production runs, materials in and out, and waste records, in whatever form you keep them, usually a scheduled export or a read-only connection to systems you already run. Zest does the mapping, so your IT team's job is access, not an integration project.

No. Zest works on the production and waste records you already keep, so there is nothing to fit, calibrate or maintain on the line. If a site later wants finer detail than its records hold, we can scope that with you, but nothing needs to change on the line to start.

Some loss is unavoidable, and the goal there is to get the most value from it rather than send it to disposal. Zest traces every loss back to the order and batch it came from, and helps you route what is genuinely unavoidable to its best use, through our redistribution partners. So even the waste you cannot eradicate stops being a pure cost.

We start with one site and its highest-waste lines, connect Zest to your records, and walk your team through the first costed waste picture. You see exactly where the money is going before you commit to anything wider.

We start with one site and its highest-waste lines on purpose, so you prove the value on ground you know before going wider. Once that picture is working, the same approach extends site by site, and Zest maps each new site's process rather than forcing them all into one template. You scale at the pace the results justify, not all at once.

That depends on where your waste is, which is why we show you the number before you commit to anything wider. The first costed picture puts a figure in pounds on every loss across your highest-waste lines, so you see the size of the prize and where it sits. We scope the likely payback with you from your own data in discovery, rather than quoting a headline percentage that was true on someone else's line.

Pricing is tailored to your operation, not taken off a price list. We scope it with you after a short discovery of where your waste is and what recovering it is worth, so what you pay reflects the value on your own lines. We will walk you through it on the first call.

In a dedicated environment on Google Cloud for your organisation, under a data processing agreement. Your operational data stays yours, is never shared, and is used only to give you your waste picture.