Modern farming has a huge problem with food waste, stemming from the mismatch between specific food buyer requirements vs Mother Nature delivering an unsaleable overabundance and/or producing knobbly fruit and veg that gets devalued on aesthetic grounds. But what happens when you throw a bit of technology into the mix?
Silicon Valley based startup Full Harvest is trying to find out, citing figures that suggest — with more than 15 per cent of that occurring at the farm level. Other startups are also looking for ways to address the problem, such as Oakland-based Imperfect Produce which delivers direct to consumers. But Full Harvest is going to the source — addressing the needs of large farms and food buyers.
The bootstrapping startup has built a b2b tech platform with the aim of turning a profit out of “imperfect and surplus” fruit and veg. It’s doing this by aggregating less desirable produce from multiple farms in order to simplify the seconds selling and buying processes so that gluts and/or rejects can still have enough value to end up on the plate — rather than be thrown away at source as supply chain waste.