Cruise Ships Produce Staggering Food Waste. Fred. Olsen Is Putting AI on the Problem.
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines has partnered with Swiss AI company KITRO to trial smart food waste monitoring aboard its flagship Bolette — and the results could reshape how cruise lines manage sustainability.
Think about what it takes to feed a cruise ship. Thousands of guests, three meals a day, plus snacks, specialty dining, room service, and late-night buffets. The volume of food moving through a cruise ship galley on any given sailing is extraordinary — and so, inevitably, is the amount that ends up in the bin.
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines is now trying to change that calculation, and they’re using artificial intelligence to do it.
According to a press release published April 2, 2026, the British cruise line has launched a six-month pilot program aboard its flagship Bolette, partnering with Swiss technology company KITRO to install AI-powered food waste monitoring devices in the ship’s galley. Five KITRO units have been placed at key waste disposal points throughout the kitchen, where they automatically track, photograph, and analyze every scrap of food that gets thrown away.
How the Technology Actually Works
The KITRO system uses advanced image recognition to identify discarded food in real time. Every time something is thrown out — a plate of uneaten food, trimmed vegetables, a dish returned from the dining room — the device captures and categorizes it, recording the item’s weight, food category, and the time of day it was wasted.
That data feeds into an analytics dashboard that the galley team can review to spot patterns: Which dishes are consistently coming back unfinished? What time of day produces the most waste? Which food categories are being over-ordered? Instead of guessing, the kitchen management team gets hard numbers — and with hard numbers comes the ability to make real changes.
It’s not a novel concept in the hospitality industry on land. Hotels and restaurants have been experimenting with food waste tracking technology for years. But a cruise ship is a different environment entirely. You’re dealing with a captive kitchen that serves thousands of people in tightly scheduled windows, with supply chains that need to be locked in days or weeks before the ship reaches the next port. The margin for error — and the volume of waste that can accumulate — is much higher than a typical restaurant.
Why This Matters Beyond the Kitchen
The headline sustainability number here is striking: food waste accounts for approximately 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That figure, cited in Fred. Olsen’s announcement, actually exceeds the aviation industry’s contribution. For an industry that already faces intense scrutiny over its environmental footprint, cruise lines have an obvious motivation to address food waste — not just as a PR matter, but as a genuine emissions reduction strategy.
Jonathan Comotti, Head of Sales at KITRO, put it plainly: “Food waste is one of the most impactful and actionable sustainability challenges in the hospitality industry, and cruise ships are a fascinating environment to tackle it.”
That word — actionable — is worth dwelling on. Decarbonizing a cruise ship’s propulsion system requires massive capital investment, regulatory change, and infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at scale. Reducing food waste requires a camera, some software, and a willingness to look at the data. It’s one of the more accessible levers available to cruise lines right now, which is part of why this pilot is worth paying attention to.
KITRO itself operates in over 20 countries and supports hundreds of commercial kitchens, so this isn’t unproven technology. Bringing it into the cruise context — with Fred. Olsen’s Bolette as the test case — gives the company a new kind of operational environment to learn from.
Fred. Olsen’s Take
Dominic Simpson, Sustainability Manager at Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, framed the pilot as part of a broader commitment to understanding where waste actually occurs before trying to eliminate it. “We’re excited to roll out this trial period,” he said. “By using KITRO’s innovative AI technology, alongside their expert support, we’ll gain a clearer understanding of food waste on board, helping us make meaningful changes where they matter most.”
That framing — understand first, then act — is a sensible approach. One of the consistent failures in sustainability programs across industries is implementing solutions before diagnosing the actual problem. If you don’t know whether your waste is coming from over-ordering ingredients, over-portioning dishes, or food being returned unfinished by guests, you can’t target the intervention effectively. The six-month pilot is designed to generate exactly that diagnostic picture.
The team involved in the rollout spans multiple departments, including Fred. Olsen’s Executive Chef, Public Health Manager, Sanitation Manager, and a dedicated Food Waste Consultant — a sign that this isn’t being treated as a technology experiment tucked away in one corner of the ship, but as a cross-functional operational initiative.
What Comes Next
If the Bolette pilot produces meaningful results, Fred. Olsen has indicated it will assess opportunities for a wider rollout across its fleet. That’s the standard language for a trial that leadership hopes will succeed, and the incentive structure is straightforward: less food waste means lower provisioning costs, lower disposal costs, and a smaller environmental footprint. The business case and the sustainability case point in the same direction.
For cruise passengers, this kind of behind-the-scenes technology rarely gets much attention — guests aren’t usually thinking about what happens in the galley when they sit down for dinner. But the efficiency of a ship’s food operation has a direct effect on the quality and consistency of what ends up on the plate, and on how seriously the line takes its environmental commitments overall.
Fred. Olsen isn’t the largest cruise line in the world, but it has a reputation as a thoughtful operator with a loyal following among British cruisers. Choosing the Bolette — its flagship — as the test vessel for this technology is a signal that this pilot has institutional backing, not just a line item in a sustainability report. We’ll be watching for results when the six months are up.
Source: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines — Trials AI Technology to Reduce Food Waste (Press Release, April 2, 2026)