Ugly-food company taps Seattle’s appetite
SEATTLE — Crooked-neck parsnips with wickedly long whiskers. Double-jointed carrots and knobby spuds. These fruits and veggies never make it to the catwalk of the supermarkets.
Misshapen with skin blemishes, the ugly ducklings end up in landfills or go to food banks.
There’s an underworld full of ugly produce, waiting to be gobbled or turned into pie fillings. But who will have them?
Seattle, apparently, has its hand raised.
San Francisco-based Imperfect Produce, which delivers boxes of rejected “ugly” fruits and vegetables to doorsteps in California and in Portland, Oregon, tested the Seattle market in October. The aim was to sign up at least 300 Seattle households by the end of 2017.
The company met its goal weeks before even delivering one pockmarked lime to a Seattle address. According to administrators, more than 2,000 Seattle customers signed up in less than four weeks.
“We had to start a waiting list right away,” said Ben Simon, CEO of Imperfect Produce. “We were super-happy with that response, surprised in the best possible way. As soon as we saw the demand was that high, a week before the launch, we had to go on a hiring spree.”
The delivery service trucks in more than 30,000 pounds of surplus produce to Seattle each week, much of it undersized, bruised or contorted — imperfect in appearance, but edible.
In targeting Seattle, Imperfect Produce believed the foodwaste problem would resonate in a city with composting and recycling laws.
While the company claims that its ugly produce is 30 to 50 per cent cheaper than supermarket prices, that’s not its main sales pitch. It preaches that buying rejected produce saves the environment, such as keeping wasted food from rotting in landfills, which creates greenhouse gas.
Imperfect Produce didn’t revolutionize the “ugly-food” concept. It has taken an old-school component of farmers markets to the mainstream.
San Francisco has been the epicentre of the movement. The local supermarket chain Raley’s and Whole Foods have sold wonky produce at a discount at stores around northern California.
In 2015, Imperfect Produce launched in the Bay Area to take advantage of the large bounty and a demographic tailored for the ugly-food movement.
The surplus comes from about 100 different farms across the U.S. West Coast, as far away as Arizona, said Sara Custer, vice president of operations.
Imperfect Produce expanded to serve households in Los Angeles, Portland and now Seattle. The company has just launched in Chicago and is also expanding to San Diego and Sacramento in California this year.