Food waste in America and around the world is a real problem, with far-reaching effects. Along the supply chain, we throw away a shocking amount of perfectly edible food — one-third of our total food supply, actually. That tossed food is then sent to landfills where it rots and creates a huge amount of Co2 and methane greenhouse gases. This is bad. Not to mention we’re literally throwing money away. One company took a step back and looked at why this is happening and where the gaps were that could be filled to both help the environment and save us all money.
Imperfect Produce’s CEO Ben Simon learned about foods getting thrown away because they didn’t meet cosmetic standards and decided to leap into action. He started Imperfect Produce to be a fail-safe of sorts for farmers to make a profit on foods that big retailers deemed too ‘un-pretty.’ Simon’s company goes straight to the farmers and collects all the rejected and perfectly edible produce and ships it back to their warehouse. Once there, they package the produce into boxes and ships them off to their subscribers. So far “6.1 million pounds” of food has been saved. That equates to “303 million gallons of water” saved and “20.7 million pounds of Co2” that is not in our air, according to the Imperfect Produce’s website.
Three things are happening here. One, Simon’s business is giving farmers a secondary source of income that otherwise would have been thrown away. Two, the fact that these foods aren’t rotting in a landfill means water is being saved and fewer greenhouse gases are going into our over-taxed atmosphere. And, three, Imperfect Produce’s home delivery is saving the average household 30 to 50 perfect off their produce grocery bill. Imperfect Produce notes that they’ve saved their shoppers “$2.7 million.” That’s a big win, in an era when we need ecological innovation more than ever.
