Smart scale toolset for household food waste estimation

Accurate measurement of household food waste is essential for informed policymaking and effective reduction strategies. Traditional methods – such as questionnaires, food diaries and waste composition analysis – face trade-offs between accuracy, participant burden, scalability and cost. This article presents a novel digital methodology designed to support structured, harmonized and scalable measurement of household food waste in real-life settings. The approach integrates a custom-built smart kitchen scale with a mobile application and a cloud-based portal. The system guides participants through daily waste recording by automatically capturing weight data and allowing users to categorize discarded food by type, avoidability and disposal method. All data is transmitted in real time to a centralized platform, ensuring consistent, high-quality data with minimal user effort. The toolset supports field campaigns involving hundreds of households over a defined period (e.g., one week), improving standardization and reducing reporting errors. The method can be seen as an enhanced form of direct measurement, combining the accuracy of weighing-based approaches with the efficiency of digital tools. A pilot study confirms the system’s feasibility, participant acceptance and ability to generate detailed, comparable datasets suitable for food waste reporting at different levels. This work contributes a practical, open-source solution for household food waste monitoring, addressing key limitations of existing methods. It offers a valuable tool for researchers, municipalities and NGOs to conduct reliable, large-scale food waste assessments. • Digitally supported method for measuring household food waste. • Combines smart scale, mobile app, and cloud portal for standardized collection. • Reduces participant burden while improving data accuracy and comparability. • Suitable for short-term campaigns and large-scale field deployment.