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#730: The Frugal Architect w/ Werner Vogels: At Too Good To Go, Practical Engineering Keeps Food Out of the Bin
00:36:16
In the fifth episode of "The Frugal Architect" podcast, Werner and co-host Simon Elisha welcome Mort
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- [00:00]
Simon
This is episode 730 of the AWS podcast, released on July 21, 2025.
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Leji
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the AWS Podcast. I'm Leji with it. Great to have you back for another episode of our special series, the Frugal Architect. And you can't have that series without the gentleman himself, Werner Vogel, CTO of Amazon. G', day, Werner.
- [00:23]
Werner Vogels
Thank you, Simon. And I'm particularly looking forward to this one. They've been on stage with me at Re Invent, so I'm pretty sure we got a pretty good story to tell.
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Leji
Oh, it's a good one. It's a good one. And the two gentlemen who are joining us to tell the story, the first one is Morton Kelderbeck, who serves as the CTO of Too Good To Go, where he leads the technology strategy for the world's largest marketplace for surplus food. Morton, welcome to the podcast.
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Morton Kelderbeck
Thank you, Simon.
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Leji
Robert is a key technology leader at Too Good To Go, having joined the company in early 2018 as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robert.
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Simon
Thank you. And it's good to be here.
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Leji
Let's get into the story here. Now, Verna, you had these two gentlemen on stage, but before they were too good to go, they were both at Edomondo. And so there's a story here, isn't there?
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Werner Vogels
Yeah. So can you tell me what you actually did before you did Good To Go?
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Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah, Maybe I can start here. Right. I can say that back in 2009, I was still working at Nokia at the time, right? And GPS technology was an awesome new thing. We all knew these trackers from our cars, but then it became popular to track your running exercise. And I just have to say that that was such an awesome idea. And I learned three Danish founders had started this company called Entomonto, which was all about kind of making people run and making people become healthy and do sports and. And I felt that was just something that I wanted to be part of, right? It. It sounded so awesome because I. I like running, I like biking, I like staying healthy. And now this technology became kind of a lever for. For doing that. Right. And, yeah. So I. In 2009, I. I got an opportunity to join this. And it was very early startup, right? There was one engineer and the three founders, none of them were engineers, so I got the chance to join almost without salary.
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Leji
What a great opportunity.
- [02:37]
Morton Kelderbeck
What a great opportunity. Yeah. And back in 2009, the iPhone was here, but it was not very widely used. So kind of my first task there was to build a Simply and sports Tracker for Nokia phones. So that was my way in. And there was one other engineer at the time and he was doing the backend. Right. And so there was me and him and we had a few students helping out as well. But basically the two of us, we had to figure out everything. Right. And mobile protocol, how does the mobile speak to the server? We had to design the protocol. We had to realize that in 2009, using HTTPs on mobile connections that went through all the mobile operators was actually not something that we could do. So we had to learn a lot of stuff and eventually we figured it out and the company started growing. Eventually in 2012, we could hire a lot more people. And I think that's when Robert came on board.
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Leji
Yeah, that's also when scaling starts to happen.
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Simon
I came from a different background, so also engineer, but also coming from financial insurance. It's a very different beast than a startup. But I was like, hey, I want to try something new. You learn something, you want to go out something. And I actually started running a bit more, being more active after a, let's say, slightly sedated lifestyle for a couple of years. And I felt all this opportunity was kind of fit into it and just joining a startup was, it was, it was fun. I mean, we were younger back then. A lot more time, a little more hands.
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Leji
Yeah.
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Simon
More energy. Yeah. And I, I stumbled upon this job post by chance and I. They were running a. I don't know, I don't think a lot of people run this production anymore, but Apache Wicket system and that has State, which will come maybe touch upon a bit later. Scaling State on server side is. I can see. Werner, that is not something that's fun.
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Leji
It's not something I want to do.
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Werner Vogels
I hope you did get paid.
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Simon
Yeah, I did, I did get paid.
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Morton Kelderbeck
We had, we had started to pay salary at that time, so.
- [05:17]
Leji
So both of you had some of those really interesting dive deep lessons early on, relatively early on. And then you've come together at Too Good to Go. Firstly, for all of us listening, what is Too Good to Go and what, what's the purpose of it?
- [05:35]
Morton Kelderbeck
Too Good to Go is a. Is a company that was founded with the purpose of fighting food waste. Right. It was originally founded back in 2016, maybe even early 15, with the idea that kind of the original idea was that buffet restaurants, they were throwing out way too much food at the end of business. So the founders, they decided that, hey, some people would be willing to buy that food for a reduced price and the restaurants would save money. They didn't have to throw out their food. They could even turn their potential waste into a bit of cash, and the planet would also benefit. So it was like a win, win, win, as we say in Tuku, to go kind of, the consumers get a bit cheap food, the stores get a bit of cash, and the planet wins. And then they realized quickly that it was not only interesting for buffet restaurants. A lot of food businesses have this problem that they like to have food available even at the end of business. So just before they close down, there's still a lot of food, fresh food available. And instead of throwing it out, they could. We. We gave them an opportunity to.
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Simon
To sell it. So.
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Morton Kelderbeck
So that's what Tuko. Tuko is about. Yeah.
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Werner Vogels
Where does the food normally go to?
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Morton Kelderbeck
It normally goes to the bin.
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Simon
Yeah.
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Morton Kelderbeck
Which is. It sounds crazy, right? When you.
- [07:12]
Leji
It's a landfill.
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Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah. It goes to its landfill. Right. And. And then. Yeah, we have this way. That is a win for the stores. They can. They don't have to throw it out, and basically no one loses. Right. Which. This is one of the kind of. This is one of the few things that we can actually do without any kind of. There's no loss in comfort or anything. Right. Everybody wins.
- [07:39]
Werner Vogels
I always thought to do good, you need to be an ngo, a nonprofit. But it turns out that there are many cases where you can do good, have a good business, and your customers are severely helped by it as well. So that you do good, but you still make a good buck yourself.
- [07:59]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah.
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Simon
Yeah. And I think. I mean, this is one of the approaches we also have, as our CEO Minde Lge, talks about, is like, if you are an ngo, you are dependent on someone else making sure you can operate. You need other funding from government or from donations. And Jesus. And I think she's right in a strong believer in that. Hey, you can make a win, win, win. You can make a business out of it to ensure that you can continue to operate. Because if you. Let's say. Let's say we. We do this, we scale out, we can do great. But if we are not here tomorrow because we. We can't operate, we have no money, then what's the point?
- [08:45]
Werner Vogels
Yeah. Especially with uncertainties like USAID and others where companies or organizations suddenly can no longer operate. Yeah. It's a different story. But congratulations for your model.
- [08:59]
Simon
Thank you.
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Leji
And I love that we're talking about, you know, waste not, want not when it comes to food at the same time as we talk about the frugal architect. So let's. Let's start. Let's dive in to, you know, you know when you're watching a movie and something blows up within the first five minutes and that sort of sets the stage for the story. We're going to start with that moment because you had the classic IT challenge of a business or an organization doing really, really well. And it's actually a massive headache because you're doing so well. So it's a good thing, but a bad thing, but a good thing. What happened during the 2018 World cup besides your team not winning? Tell us what took place and what that did in terms of your architecture and what it was and what it went to.
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Morton Kelderbeck
So basically, soccer, like good old soccer, is a big thing in Denmark, right? And there was a World Championships in 2018. And at the same time, I mean, our technology team in too good to go, wasn't very big at the time. Right. So I think we can safely assume that everyone was watching the soccer game. Denmark versus Belgium. Unfortunately, I think we lost. But that's not the point of this story. But the point is that without us knowing, at the same time, our French country manager, kind of our leader in France, she went on national TV in France and France was not playing this evening, so there were actually plenty of people who were watching about. Too good to go. And we crashed and burned, right? We. We got so much attention in France that our servers, they broke down. Right? And yeah, it, it was. I think I had been with the company for less than two months when it happened, so it was kind of like an eye opener to me, how, how unready, how not ready we were to handle such a. A situation. We crashed and burned. And I, if I remember correctly, it actually, it took us some hours to get back up. We actually, we basically had to wait until the traffic softened until we could get back up.
- [11:11]
Leji
Thundering Hertz. Thundering Hertz. Just bring it in.
- [11:15]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it was a moment of pride, right, because, hey, we are so popular, right, that our servers can be taken down. That's, that's awesome. But it was also kind of a, a big headache to figure out how we would avoid the same situation again.
- [11:35]
Werner Vogels
So do we know why it happened?
- [11:37]
Simon
Oh, yes, I think that's, that's on me. So I did join the company a bit before. Before Morton. And so the initial, the initial server architecture was basically a PHP app running against a SQL database. There are some limitations that comes with that kind of architecture. You rely heavily on the database. There's no state or caching naturally built into to the language, it can be done, but it's not naturally flowing as other architectures and also the single database. So the moment you just, even with auto scaling on, when you can scale compute, you can't really scale the database and then suddenly everything just hammers down and at that point you kind of lose it. Even if you, if you manage to, to, to scale compute, it will be stuck on database connections or services and, and they will be taken out and rotated and you can't really do anything about it. So yes, we kind of knew. So the people who build it, they had a great business idea.
- [12:43]
Leji
But yeah, and you build what you can build at the time. This is, there's this thing, you know, premature optimization, premature scaling. This is the, this is why we need smart people. Because it's like, well, at what point do I make that decision? And unfortunately, the business doesn't always let us know what they're doing and where they're doing it. I guess, Werner, you've seen that many, many times in many, many organizations that this is the unpredictability that the cloud is kind of there to help with.
- [13:09]
Werner Vogels
How did you get it back online?
- [13:11]
Simon
Yeah, well, actually, as Morten says, we did wait and then we came online. I think at that point we were, we were slowly, we were actually slowly going over to aws, but not really using the infrast. So like a lift and shift. And if you do lift and shift for I think was a cPanel server somewhere, if it rings a bell with some people, which is like a single instance, everything running in once, which is great unless we have scale. So, so doing it's not enough to do a shift and lift. We, we learned that during AT and Mondo at, like you can say similar problems, but also at scale, you need to think, you know, you have a lot of opportunities. Even in 2018 now you have even more opportunities. There's like tons of things you can do, but to get it up, well, we have to wait for traffic to go down and then, you know, what is what took us down.
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Morton Kelderbeck
Right?
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Simon
That's the next question. Is there any monitoring? Not super a lot, but it's very obvious. We have when. If you ever seen the app, we like a lot of apps, we have a listing the moment you open. And that was a very, very, very huge SQL query. So it will take you down. It's only a matter of when. So the first thing we did was, okay, we need to do something about this. What can we do effectively, like fairly fast. And the first was like, hey, let's just take the services that are the most heavy that we can start moving over to another architecture, possibly some caching that would be nice, and then just move endpoint by endpoint to that new architecture. So maybe for listings, it's like you don't need to think about what your business transaction, you think you need to show your product and you start thinking about eventually consistency and things that we may assume that everyone does. But if you just do a school project architecture type, it doesn't really fit into that.
- [15:08]
Morton Kelderbeck
I mean, maybe to take it a step back, when this happened, we already had enough signal from the, from the business side that, okay, we are, we are actually working on something that is successful here. So we knew, we knew that we had to be able to scale it. And we had already kind of, we had already started talking about what to do and the team size at the time, kind of the total take and product team in the company at this time in 2018 was, I mean, it was in the neighborhood of 10 people. So you can do a lot with 10 people, but you can't do that much, right? So we had a lot of decisions to make. Right. And one of the decisions we made was to we are going to build something in Java, right? Kind of. That was our first architecture decision and why it wasn't the latest and greatest, but we knew it was reliable. We had people on the team who understood and we knew that we could recruit people in the area of Copenhagen, a lot of people have that skill. So we kind of. That was our first decision. Right. Our second decision, I think at the time was to use as many services as possible from Amazon. We were already logged in on Amazon. So that was also an early decision. We use as many services as we can and build only what we have to build. And then kind of the third and very important decision that we made because probably as many other companies in this situation, we had this discussion, should we, should we pause feature development and rebuild everything from scratch and then kind of keep the business on hold for like a year or half a year or something like that while waiting. And we made the decision not to do that. We are going to do this gradually.
- [16:58]
Werner Vogels
Yeah.
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Morton Kelderbeck
So we, we kind of slowly started kind of. I think first we did an experimental endpoint which was not very heavy on traffic, just to make, just to prove the concept. But after that we took kind of the most critical parts of the system and rebuilt them one at a time. Right. So basically, and I think we were super, super optimistic at the early days, thinking that we would be done in like half a year, of course, end of 18. Right. And in reality we, we retired the last line of PHP code two years later, in mid 2020. But it was okay, right? We, you got the. No one cared. Right. Because we.
- [17:44]
Leji
Yeah, and it's hard. I mean, you're, you're, you're sort of rebuilding the airplane while flying the airplane. And in my experience, when people are sort of changing languages, the, the, you know, the phrase how hard could it be? Always comes up. And then two years later you find.
- [17:59]
Werner Vogels
Out, plus the people who built the airplane aren't there anymore.
- [18:05]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah, exactly.
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Werner Vogels
Yeah. So indeed, removing a single line of PHP and nobody complains, nothing breaks. It's one of those cases. Yeah.
- [18:15]
Leji
And this was, this was tens of thousands of processes running and things going on. This is a big, this is not a small system that was running. It was, it was doing a lot of stuff.
- [18:24]
Werner Vogels
Well, you have to remember that at Amazon retail we used to be, we used to use Perl as our language for page description. And at some moment you start to realize that there are no good Perl programmers. So you need to move away from it.
- [18:47]
Simon
Yeah, right. Write only language. Don't read other people's per code.
- [18:52]
Leji
So, so then let's, let's, let's take the next step. And it's interesting because as you're telling this story to remind me, there's a, there's a presentation we've had at Re Invent from the solution architects almost from the start. I think it's called scaling to your first 10,000 users. 10 million users, I should say. And it tells exactly the story that you're going through and then those steps you take. And it's interesting how folks have to, you have to go through those phases. But you had, you had one that I think is a lot of companies and software providers want to get to, but not all get to, which is suddenly you got to go international. And again, that's one of those amazing gifts of wow, we're going global. But it's also, oh my goodness, we're going global. So give us some context of what was going on and how you tackled it.
- [19:34]
Simon
Yeah, I think so. As Maud mentioned, in the mid-2020, we were like, okay, we retired the last piece of PSP code. Great effort, guys. We're also launching features. So it went well. I will call it a success. We were just optimistic about the timeline. But then it's like, next step, hey, we're going to go global, we're going to go into the US and we were like, okay, us, what does that mean for us? Well, that means latency. We were in the European Data center in Ireland, which I guess a lot of European customers start off in. And the latency tests were a bit poor from our mobile experience. So what do you do? You have an architecture, you have servers, they're not built for multi region. So how do you scale that? That was kind of like what is the experience we want to give to our. We want the users, both our consumers and partners, to have a first rate experience in the US and how do we take that challenge?
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Morton Kelderbeck
So.
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Simon
We ended up with a solution where the application itself didn't really need to know a whole lot about being in multiple regions, but we would simply route. So you have a home region and then there is a single component that knows how to route or fetch data no matter where it is.
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Werner Vogels
So you do want customers to migrate between, let's say your European good to go and the US One. It's not such a clear separation between them.
- [21:07]
Simon
No. So it is. And of course when you build for two, we also build for multiple things and also expand it to in Australia later on. So it's basically that you can go as a customer in the US if you just fetch the feed where the data is in the US it will just stay there. But if you have to interact with some data that's yours, we'll either have to fetch that relevant data or route the entire call to your home region. And that is built into it and something that we have standardized. So each developer just needs to remember they need to route, but otherwise don't really think about it.
- [21:45]
Werner Vogels
So the customers are worldwide, but I assume your offerings are extremely local.
- [21:52]
Morton Kelderbeck
So basically we don't now we do a little bit, but back then we did not offer delivery. Right. So the food offerings are super local. Right. Because the consumers, they actually have to pick them up at their local store, so they have to walk to the store. So typically you will buy something that is within a few kilometers from where you live or where you work or something like that. But some of the thinking behind not running completely separated architectures was rooted in business. Right. During our expansion in Europe, every time we open a new market, a new country, we have a kind of a cold start problem. Right. We need to get some stores onto the platform and we need to get consumers. And we learned that the tourist use case is actually not nothing. Right. We got a lot of. In the early days of every new market, we get a lot of help from people traveling. So we did not want to miss out on that one. Right. We wanted tourists visiting the US from Europe to help us drive the initial growth and so on. So there was a business reason behind it and we have not regretted that one.
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Werner Vogels
From the vendors or the restaurant's perspective, do you have to go out and find them or is this something where they come to you?
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Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah, we have the. We have sales teams in every market where we operate.
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Werner Vogels
Okay.
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Morton Kelderbeck
And typically we start from no awareness at all. That is why. And then kind of we have outgoing sales teams and they reach out and then eventually when Too Good to Go becomes more famous in a market, then we start having kind of the inbound requests and then kind of that also kind of helps, helps the growth machine.
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Werner Vogels
So very cool. Excellent.
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Leji
And so one of the things you've spoken about in terms of this architecture and some of the choices you made was boring, quote unquote, technology. And not in the pejorative sense, but to help us define boring for us and why. You like boring?
- [24:16]
Simon
Yeah, so actually we like to be boring, but not stale. So let's say in the case of too good to go, right, you have some people, there was young entrepreneurs, they're not technologists, but they got a great idea and got a really good start. And if you then come in and say, hey, we're going to change it out, I'm going to use the latest and greatest, then I'm actually betting that business, I'm taking that bet. And you know, I don't know how that's going to go. They don't really care about technology in that sense. Like we as technologists, we care about technologies. But I also like something true and tried in that sense that it's a safe right. You need to know how to use it. It's not enough that hey, now we have the newest language or if it's a JavaScript, you have a newest library number 1000 this month and you're going to change everything and someone deprecates it. You have to be a bit boring. You have to, you're going to live with these choices. Software, like I was in an insurance company, there was mainframes around, there was PL1. And for those who doesn't know what PL1 stands for, it's Programming Language 1 and this was in the 2000s. And so it's like your choices will. You have to plan for long term. So don't bet the business just because you want to try something. Be a bit safe, but also make sure that you continue on because technology do progress and as there's this, I forgot who the famous quote is. Like technology is progressing as a faster pace than it used to. Never had. It's always going faster and faster, just gets faster. Make the smart choices and then maybe if you can avoid really over committing to something, then you have a choice forward. So that's what I mean with, we mean with boring. Choose something that will work.
- [26:16]
Werner Vogels
Are most of your developers still in Denmark?
- [26:19]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yes, we have the bulk part of our development team in Copenhagen on site and that we have a reasonable sized team in Paris and then a little bit in Madrid. Right. But we are still trying to grow out of Copenhagen. I think we are around just below 200 people now. And as Too Good to Go has become more and more famous then we are still able to attract good people in the company. But I mean eventually we will run out of talent in coke making and we will have to expand further.
- [27:00]
Leji
And it's interesting too, I think as you're growing you're thinking about doing this again frugally and just to give a sense of scale. Now this is a platform that has over 81 million registered users worldwide, 145,000 active business partners. So there's a lot going on on the system. And one of the philosophies you have is always ask why Help us unpack that. Because it's interesting as you're growing and scaling and clearly moving quickly, different countries, it's kind of like, well, we're doing stuff. Always ask why. Sounds like an interesting sort of pause for a moment.
- [27:39]
Simon
So, so what we want to do is like when you, when you do something is like, don't do it just for the sake of doing it. It's like get down to the call why you're doing this, why are you implementing this feature? Why are you taking this technology choice? Like are you doing it just because you think it's fun or because it's going to help the business or it's going to help us scale. Just like there needs to be a reason and it needs to be a good one because every time you take a choice, you also decide not to do something. And we do have a tendency, we are assuming bias for action. But sometimes you do, like maybe you shouldn't or maybe you should just cut down. It's very easy to get excited by. I can also get excited by technology, but I tend to like, okay, then I'm going to play around with my laptop rather than saying let's change the entire back end infrastructure. So it's about why are you Doing something.
- [28:36]
Leji
It's about that purposefulness I think comes into it. That's a challenge. I know a lot of folks really struggle with it because like you say things are moving so quickly. Like, you know, everyone's talking about LLMs engine, AI and there's this new language and that new language and this framework and this like. And, and what you're suggesting here is it's important to just sort of like take a beat.
- [28:58]
Simon
So if you take.
- [28:59]
Leji
Be on the, on the ball for the right thing.
- [29:00]
Simon
Yeah. So if you take LLMs and AI, it's like you're also like, what problem are you trying to solve?
- [29:05]
Morton Kelderbeck
Right.
- [29:06]
Simon
If someone goes tell you, I'm not saying that's. That there's definitely problems you can solve with AI. LLM just like, hey, let's use AI and like, okay, what problem are you want? What do you want to solve? Because there's also a thousand choices. Just LMM says exponential choices. So what is the problem you want? And then we can find out, like, we don't need to maybe try every single them to try something. But what's the core of the problem? Where always when I have a problem, like, how do you see, hey, you come to me with a problem. My first question would probably be like, so once we have solved this problem, how does your world look? What's going to be different? What does your workflow do? Or what are we going to do differently before we start even thinking about building anything? And also a lot of the times you never get to the full end. You get well enough that you get the value and then you continue.
- [30:05]
Werner Vogels
I do notion that most of my customers are overwhelmed. I mean there's 10 new models even we. And so there is so many stories continuously that it's a hard time for customers to so make a choice, do what we need to do. Do we really need to. Then I really like your approach. What's the problem that we try to solve with this? Yeah. So I think you guys are on a very, very well path. Many of my customers would like to push a pause button. Yeah. We're living in exponential times and we have a hard time tracking it.
- [30:46]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah. But I think Robert and I, we both also, we feel a lot of pressure to kind of just as anyone else. I assume that. Right. In these AI times we are also scared of like falling behind. Right. So it is like I totally get that fear that is all over the place. But I think we are taking an approach where we experiment also in areas where we see, okay, this has something to It. So we are experimenting kind of. All our developers have access to AI tools that they can use for programming. We haven't decided on a specific one. We let every kind of, we, we think this is the early days, right? So everyone get. Are allowed to experiment with what they do. And then we have kind of learning Slack groups and. And learning meetings where we try to tell each other what works and what doesn't work and kind of learn along the way. And that works fine.
- [31:47]
Werner Vogels
That's our deal, I think, because many companies really suffer from fomo, the fear of missing out. You know, three years ago, customers would ask me, what should we do with blockchain? Nobody asked that anymore.
- [32:04]
Leji
Yeah, I have a short answer on that one too.
- [32:08]
Simon
Yeah, I think we set that one out fortunately.
- [32:11]
Leji
So it's interesting too how the fundamentals are the things that don't change. And as you've been speaking, I've been thinking about some of the aspects of the cloud that we've been speaking about for many, many years now that you applied in your business. Elasticity, the ability to grow and shrink based upon demand and go global in minutes. Now, it didn't take minutes, but you went global very quickly. I'm guessing you didn't fly to the US to tour data centers. You just got on the console and clicked US West 2 and away, and then you did your AP Southeast 2 and you were in Sydney.
- [32:43]
Morton Kelderbeck
Simon, just to add to that kind of. If you look at the timeline, right, even if we had wanted to, we actually expanded to the US in the middle of COVID so we couldn't even get into the country. So the people who went there to kind of start the commercial side, they had to fly private planes and spend two weeks in kind of isolation in a week in the Caribbean before they were allowed to get into the US to start up the business. So it was for sure interesting times to open up the US So is.
- [33:19]
Werner Vogels
There a difference between your customers in Europe and the U.S. do you see, do you see different patterns?
- [33:26]
Morton Kelderbeck
Our business is super local, right? It's like, because you have to pick up the food. So one of the things that we had to learn is that in the US People travel longer distances, right? In, in most of our European markets, our customers, they walk or bike to pick up the food, right. In the US they drive cars, right? So there are some differences, but in general, you know, even in the US People eat food. They, they like a good deal and the stores hate throwing out food, right? So there are more similarities than there are differences.
- [34:04]
Werner Vogels
Okay, cool.
- [34:05]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah, but the. The thing about the transportation to pick up the food, that was an interesting one that we hadn't really considered before.
- [34:15]
Leji
Going to the US that's super interesting and just such a great story. I think of as Verna was touching on the start. The ability to do good, have a thriving business that sustains itself and nourishes and sustains others is fantastic.
- [34:32]
Werner Vogels
And thank you for doing something extremely special that helps a lot of people.
- [34:39]
Leji
Absolutely.
- [34:39]
Werner Vogels
And eliminate waste. I remember you guys had a CO2 kind of thing in your presentation as well. Yeah, sort of. Yeah. So you're not only actually doing good with food, There's a carbon impact as well.
- [34:57]
Morton Kelderbeck
Of course.
- [34:58]
Werner Vogels
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:59]
Leji
Less. Less is less, isn't it? I think food waste. I think it was. The stat was food waste is 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
- [35:06]
Werner Vogels
Oh, yeah. Doubles it.
- [35:07]
Simon
Yeah, yeah, that's the. That's the one. I'm desperately trying to find the presentation to get the numbers right here, but.
- [35:14]
Morton Kelderbeck
It is insane to think about, right?
- [35:16]
Werner Vogels
Absolutely.
- [35:17]
Morton Kelderbeck
Because it's not food. It's like. It's just the food that we waste, that account, that accounts for up against around 10% of the total carbon emissions.
- [35:27]
Simon
So.
- [35:27]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah.
- [35:28]
Werner Vogels
Yeah. So we recently had three days of strikes of people picking up garbage, and the city of Amsterdam decided to put all that stuff in one place. If you look at what the garbage is of a city of 800,000 people in three days, it is shocking.
- [35:51]
Morton Kelderbeck
That is.
- [35:52]
Werner Vogels
Yeah, it is.
- [35:53]
Morton Kelderbeck
It is.
- [35:53]
Werner Vogels
So enough problems to solve.
- [35:56]
Morton Kelderbeck
Yeah.
- [35:56]
Leji
Well, that's the nice thing. We get to keep building and solve problems. Werner, thanks always for connecting such amazing organizations and bringing the stories and the context as well.
- [36:07]
Werner Vogels
My pleasure. And thank you, Morten and Roberts.
- [36:10]
Simon
Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure.
- [36:11]
Leji
Thanks to everyone out there. Until next time, keep on building.