Hungry Harvest, the company that rescues excess produce from farmers and wholesalers to sell to consumers, began its operations by scrutinizing the ins and outs of the food supply chain. Evan Lutz, the company’s founder and CEO, says the company gets its excess produce from four different types of sources: farmers, produce packers, wholesalers and retail distribution centers. The ‘rescued’ produce isn’t expired or defective, but it would otherwise be tossed because there’s too much of it or it’s considered too ugly, off-color or misshapen for most retailers.
“There’s 20 billion pounds of produce that kind of gets wasted across all four of those pillars,” says Lutz, although the exact amount of food wasted throughout the system is the subject of some debate. “We started this company based on the premise that we can capture it and sell it to consumers at a discount.”
The starting point was a closer look at supply and demand. “What farmers are we buying from? What’s the pricing strategy? What’re the ideal box contents? And how are we delivering that to our customers?” By answering those questions, Lutz says the company was able to begin predicting both sides of the supply and demand equation and create a successful business.
Now forbes.com tells us that Hungry Harvest is moving to a more sophisticated e-commerce platform called Magento, which Lutz says will allow them to “spit out exactly what we need to order [so] our suppliers can plan a lot better and reduce waste on their entire supply chain as well.”
