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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

full harvest

Two Good and Full Harvest Team Up With Chef Marcus Samuelsson to Fight Food Waste in Restaurants

Two Good Yogurt today announced a new food waste initiative the company has launched in partnership with Chef Marcus Samuelsson and food rescue company Full Harvest. The partnership aims to get more restaurants to cook with rescued produce in their kitchens, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson will lead the campaign by using produce rescued by Full Harvest at his NYC restaurant Red Rooster Harlem during Earth Week (April 19–24). The campaign will also support Two Good’s One Cup, Less Hunger initiative, which donates a portion of the proceeds from its yogurt product to City Harvest food banks.

Other restaurants are invited to email wastelessfeedmore@twogoodyogurt.com to get involved with Samuelsson’s Earth Week campaign. 

“We all know that food is [a] number one reason for climate change,” Samuelsson told me over the phone recently, adding that chefs’ carbon footprints are impacted by which companies they choose to supply their ingredients and what happens to leftovers and unused parts of the food. 

Roughly 1.3 billion tons of edible food goes to waste each year, and some of this is surplus produce or produce considered too “cosmetically unfit” for sale. There are many companies nowadays that rescue these unwanted food items to keep them out of landfills, including Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market. Full Harvest, however, is slightly different in that it sells directly to food businesses, rather than consumers. 

The company first partnered with Two Good in December 2020 to make flavored yogurt using rescued fruits, including lemons. 

Along with Samuelsson, these companies are hoping that the new initiative will familiarize more chefs with the concept of rescued food items and get more of them using the method, educating consumers in the process.

Of food waste in general, Samuelsson noted that fighting it has to be “as easy and accessible for consumers as possible.” 

Full Harvest Partners With Danone to Launch Yogurt Made From ‘Rescued’ Produce

Full Harvest, a B2B service that rescues imperfect produce, announced this week it has teamed up with Danone to launch a yogurt made from food that would otherwise end up in the landfill. Called Two Good ‘Good Save,’ the yogurt will be part of Danone’s Two Good line. Full Harvest said in a press release sent to The Spoon that this is the first dairy product to use 100 percent rescued produce.

Full Harvest is best known for its online marketplace that sells imperfect and surplus produce rescued from farms. The company works directly with farmers to identify the fruits and vegetables that will go to waste, then connects those farmers with food producers via its marketplace. Food producers creating products from Full Harvest-rescued goods come with a seal of verification. As yet, the marketplace is a business-to-business operation.

The initial product from the Full Harvest-Danone partnership will use California-grown Meyer lemons that would have otherwise gone to waste due to cosmetic imperfections, overproduction, or a lack of secondary markets for the farmer.

The sources of food waste and loss varies by region. While the bulk of waste in the U.S. happens at consumer-facing levels, the Full Harvest-Danone partnership nonetheless shows that there is also work to be done in curbing waste long before food reaches stores, restaurants, and homes. 

Full Harvest, meanwhile, is one of a growing number of companies rescuing so-called imperfect foods from going to the landfill. Incorporating those items into food production is one tactic. Other food-rescue companies, like Imperfect Foods and Too Good to Go, work further down the supply chain, collecting surplus food from grocery stores and restaurants and selling it at discounted prices to consumers. Imperfect went as far as to release a holiday snack box this year featuring treats that taste great but just happen to look a little less than conventionally perfect.

Danone’s Two Good ‘Good Save’ lemon product is available now. Additional flavors are slated for 2021. 

“Ugly” Produce Startup Full Harvest Reaps a $8.5 Million Series A

Today Full Harvest closed an $8.5 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from Wireframe Ventures, Rent the Runway founder Jenny Fleiss, Cultivan Sandbox Ventures, and others.

The San Francisco-based startup, which was founded in 2015, is a business-to-business produce marketplace for cosmetically imperfect (or “ugly”) fruits and vegetables. They connect farmers with food and beverage companies which use produce to make blended and processed finished products, like juice, kombucha, or sauerkraut. That way, the aesthetics don’t come into play.

Founder and CEO Christine Moseley got the idea for Full Harvest while she was working at Organic Avenue, a cold-pressed juice company. “They were paying top dollar for perfect-looking produce that they were immediately processing,” she told me over the phone. Which meant that they had to charge a super-high price — $13 per juice — to make a profit.

A self-professed “longtime entrepreneur,” Moseley started looking for innovative ways to bring down the company’s food costs. The lightbulb moment came when she was visiting the largest romaine farm in the country and saw that they only harvested about 20% of their crop. The rest — heads of lettuce that didn’t meet grocery retailers’ aesthetic standards, and therefore couldn’t be sold — were turned back into the dirt to decompose. “That produce would have been perfect for the Organic Avenues of the world,” said Moseley.

So she decided to apply her business acumen to the agricultural industry and tackle post-harvest produce waste not as a sustainability problem (though it is), but as an economic one.

The first step: creating the technology to support a marketplace for the imperfect produce. Moseley likens Full Harvest to Airbnb: “Before Airbnb, you probably would never have thought to rent your room out for the weekend, since you’d have to coordinate all the logistics yourself,” she explained. “That’s where we’re at in the world of agriculture today.”

Currently, growers have to spend hours on the phone coordinating sales — and still, Moseley told me that almost 60% of them are on the brink of bankruptcy. Full Harvest opens up a new revenue stream for growers by connecting them with buyers who will buy produce that’s too ugly for the grocery store shelves at a cheaper price than the cosmetically perfect stuff. Farmers get more money, food companies get better deals on produce, which they pass on to the consumer.

Full Harvest markets themselves as the only B2B marketplace which covers the entire end-to-end sale of imperfectly formed produce.”You can view it as an Amazon-like experience,” said Moseley. “We don’t actually make or touch the product, but we coordinate logistics and make sure the product shows up on time as promised.” At the moment they’re still pretty far from Amazon-sized, though; they’re a managed marketplace, and each participating buyer and supplier is vetted before they can join.

They certainly came along at the right time: food waste is a hot-button issue, with startups cropping up to mitigate the staggering amount of food wasted throughout the supply chain. “I would say that it could not have been more perfect timing,” said Moseley. “We found a problem, and very shortly afterwards people became aware of it.”

Imperfect Produce is another startup capitalizing on the recent trend towards “ugly” fruits and vegetables. But while Imperfect facilitates the delivery of said produce from the growers to consumers’ doorsteps, Full Harvest focuses on the B2B side of things.

According to Moseley, so far Full Harvest’s efforts have increased profits for at least one farm partner by 12% per acre. The marketplace also saves their partner CPG companies 10-30% off their produce costs. To date, the startup has facilitated the sale of almost 7 million pounds of fruits and vegetables.

Which is still small potatoes in the overall fight against food waste. According to the Ugly Fruit and Veggie Campaign, 20-40% of all produce goes to waste because of strict grocery standards. That translates to about 20 billion pounds of food per year.

But now they have some serious capital behind them: this funding round will bring Full Harvest’s total money raised to $10.5 million. Moseley said that the company will use its new funds to scale up its tech platform, expand its market reach, and grow its team from 10 people to 30-40.

And this is just the start. “There’s a huge scalable business opportunity here,” said Moseley. The good news? The more this company scales, the more produce they save. I’ll cheers an ugly fruit-based kombucha to that.