Picture this: It’s peak hours in the dining commons on the UGA campus, and students are rushing to grab lunch before their next class. Some are grabbing far more food than they intend to eat. At the end of the meal, their half-full plates are returned, resulting in hundreds of pounds of food wasted each day and thousands of pounds wasted over the course of a semester.
That’s where the founder of Raccoon Eyes, Ivan Zou, comes in. As a student in his own college campus’s dining commons, he took notice of just how much food was being wasted after each meal and decided he must do something.
Raccoon Eyes uses vision AI to help customers and staff reduce food waste in the dining commons. Scanners in the dish return take photos of every plate that passes through, identifying the type and weight of leftover food. Kitchen waste scanners also identify the type and weight of food waste on kitchen pans, trays, and serving containers. Raccoon Eyes then analyzes the data to identify patterns.
“Seeing all these issues as a student, I saw the opportunity of how we can use this food waste data as a tool to help kitchens better understand what and how much students are eating, as well as how we can use this data to show students how easy it is to dine responsibly and sustainably,” said Zou.
UGA Dining Services piloted Racoon Eyes at Village Summit Dining Commons in spring 2025 and expanded the technology to Bolton Dining Commons and Oglethorpe Dining Commons in fall 2025.
The information provided has helped Dining Services identify student favorites along with low-preference dishes that students were leaving on their plates. In response, chefs in the dining commons have modified their recipes to maximize student satisfaction and minimize waste.
“One that comes to mind immediately was the pizza crust at Village Summit,” said India Barfield, former executive chef and sustainability coordinator for Dining Services who now serves as the waste reduction coordinator for the Office of Sustainability.
“Each weekly report shows the top three wasted food items, and pizza crust was consistently in the top three,” Barfield said. “So, we took that information and decided to look at the crust itself and change the recipe. It made it so much better, and pizza crust fell off the weekly report.”
Along with the food scanners, Raccoon Eyes provides an interactive tablet on which students can answer questions and leave reviews of menu items served that day, helping Dining Services learn more about students’ preferences. Raccoon Eyes collected 60,000 pieces of feedback last fall, averaging 700 per day.
“It’s fun, and it’s really easy to do,” said John Neely, UGA’s 2025-2026 Student Government Association president. “Even something so small that a student interacts with, like clicking a button on the way out, really adds to that educational aspect of what food waste really means.”
In the kitchen, Raccoon Eyes has helped Dining Services identify overproductions, operational issues, production issues, and opportunities for additional staff training to reduce food waste.
Across the three dining commons using Raccoon Eyes, Dining Services reduced the amount of food left on students’ plates in the fall 2025 semester by 19% over the previous semester, equivalent to 15,000 pounds of food waste eliminated. In addition, kitchen waste was reduced by 32% over the previous semester, equivalent to 6,000 pounds of food.
Raccoon Eyes will be incorporated into the new dining commons in the Dining, Learning, and Well-being Center when it opens in fall 2026.
Each visit to the dining commons offers the UGA community an opportunity to participate in a campus-wide effort to reduce waste. “We don’t have to engage in grand heroic actions to engage in the process of change,” said Barfield.
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By Madeline Parker