Cruise lines have for many years spent a lot of time thinking about food.

From how much of it to buy, to how much of it gets eaten, and then what exactly happens to the rest once the buffet closes. For Chris O’Brien, the founder and chief executive of Austin-based Hungry Giant Waste Systems, that last part is basically the whole business, and his dehydration technology is now being used by cruise brands, some of them fleet wide.

“The company’s systems are already running on many vessels, some major brands have our technology fleet wide, and they are seeing really strong ROI,” O’Brien said.

Some use their aptly named “Chewie,” a self-contained bio-grinder that grinds and dewaters food, and some use bio-dehydrators, a food waste dryer.

“Some combine the systems to increase throughput to reduce offloads and discharge too,” O’Brien explains.

Waste from international voyages is treated by USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service as “regulated garbage,” which has to be incinerated, sterilized or otherwise handled under strict protocols before it leaves a ship in a U.S. port, so cutting how much of it a ship has to carry and offload matters.

O’Brien started his career path into waste management by working a retail job in Sydney, Australia in the mid-2000s. He had noticed just how much styrofoam packaging was heading straight into the trash after staff unpacked deliveries for customers.

He thus felt inspired to build a machine that could crush and compact that material at the source, then patented it, and spent many years building and selling businesses in Australia’s waste and recycling industry before relocating to Austin, Texas in 2018.

He then went after an even bigger market, food waste, with the same enthusiastic instinct for solving a problem other people have mostly ignored.

Hungry Giant’s cruise business grew out of that same instinct, and out of technology that first originated in South Korea.

The company’s core idea, like a lot of other good ideas out there, is actually pretty simple once you can see it more clearly.

Essentially most food waste is a majority of water. So if you can grind it up and drive all the moisture out, you are left with just a fraction of the original volume and a byproduct that is stable enough to sit around for a while without rotting, smelling or drawing the bane of any food focused businesses, pests.

That puts Hungry Giant in a different lane than a lot of other biodigesters out there that many cruise lines have traditionally used fleetwide.

Digesters work more like an artificial stomach. They basically are breaking down the “food” with microorganisms and enzymes into a watery pulp that is then able to be discharged at sea as gray water/liquid waste stream.

Hungry Giant’s dehydrators go pretty much in the opposite direction.

They first cook the waste at temperatures well above what any pathogen can survive and then pull the water out through a steam-and-condense process, so what comes out the other end is a dry, biologically stable biomass, not a liquid.

This can then be stored, offloaded at a port, turned into fertilizer or soil amendment, or in some cases even burned for its energy value.

“The combination of our two machines are also great for retrofits,” O’Brien said of pairing the company’s grinders with its dehydrators, and noted that even ships running much smaller operations can sometimes skip the grinder step entirely and just feed the waste straight into a dehydrator.

The two pieces of equipment, the bio-grinder and the bio-dehydrator, handle different jobs.

Grinders, installed lower in a ship, will macerate the food waste into a semi-dry pulp which can be configured with a vacuum transfer system that moves the material from as many as eight separate kitchen stations to one central collection point. This is incredibly useful on a mega-ship with multiple galleys spread across several decks in use.

“Bio-Dehydrators, which accept whole food or ground food pulp from the Chewie systems, reduce the volume by somewhere between 70 and 93%, leaving a stabilized biomass ready for offload. Machines record all throughput data and machine status to their cloud portal. A larger ship takes on multiple grinders and larger model dehydrators, typically 700lbs or larger and are placed in lower decks or in galleys,” O’Brien said, “while smaller ships can go with our smaller units. We have a full range of sizes to cater for all the different volumes of food waste.”

The biomass can then be offloaded, then be incinerated or discharged, all depending on the brands operations, itineraries, or their sustainability plans, which allows them to have multiple options for final handling.

Retrofitting an existing ship, rather than building the system into a newbuild, makes up around 90% of Hungry Giant’s current cruise installs, O’Brien comments, and the company handles the whole job itself rather than outsourcing it.

Hungry Giant sends its own personal survey crew to assess the space, then its own installation team to unpack, weld and penetrate whatever needs penetrating to get the units fitted and plumbed in, before training the ship’s own recycling crew, engineers or galley staff to run the equipment day to day.

No specialized hires are required on the cruise line’s side, O’Brien said, just existing crew folded into a workflow that already has the job of moving food between prep rooms, grinders and dehydrators as a matter of course.

Initial talks are also ongoing with other major brands, alongside a push into smaller river vessels, where they see value in the volume reduction more so than reducing regulated garbage offloads.