Americans are wasteful with food. According to Feeding America, “every year, 72 billion pounds of food goes to waste while 37 million Americans struggle with hunger”. Who is responsible for this waste, which ends up in our landfills?

Studies have shown that Americans acknowledge food waste is a problem. However, our lifestyles have become so busy that we do not stop to consider how we can reduce our consumption at home.

 

According to the USDA, the largest share of household food waste comes from fruits and vegetables. Many times, consumers lack the knowledge or awareness of the importance of handling fresh produce correctly. Improper storage will cause the quality to deteriorate, ultimately ending up in the trash.

 

During COVID-19, Americans have become increasingly anxious about their food supply. Once shelter-in-place orders were issued, schools, restaurants, and businesses closed. Consumers began stocking up on paper products and groceries so they would not need to leave home. Supermarkets were unprepared for the rapid increase in purchases and quickly found their shelves empty. Replenishing basic food supplies has been challenging for many retailers over the past several weeks. It is difficult to convince people that we do not have a food shortage. What we really have is a disrupted supply chain that was not prepared for this situation. To complicate matters, our household food waste problem is worsening as more people eat at home.

 

The amount of food loss from farmers has been significantly higher during this pandemic. The closure of restaurants, amusement parks, schools, and hotels severely impacted the food service industry. Many farmers grow produce specifically for programs with food service companies. With the sudden halt in business, large amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables were left unharvested in the fields to rot or were discarded. It was not an easy fix for farmers to make a quick switch from supplying food service to supermarkets. The shortest explanation I can offer is that customer requirements for food service and retailers differ, and it takes time to implement the necessary changes.

 

Food loss also occurs in packinghouses. Shoppers prefer perfectly looking fruits and vegetables. Produce will be discarded in a cull bin if it does not meet the customer specifications, and by customer, I am specifically referring to YOU AND ME. As consumers, we have been conditioned to buy fruits and vegetables by appearance and size. When we do this, most of us are not aware of how we may be giving up taste.

 

Culls are the fruit that have been separated in the packinghouses due to imperfect shape, wrong size, inconsistent color, ripeness, or blemished or injured fruit. Farmers have already invested a substantial amount of money in growing and transporting it to the packinghouse. If the fruit is not considered salable, packing it into a carton only adds costs for the farmer, who is already operating on tight margins.

What do the packinghouses do with these culls? Culls are sold to food processors who use them for jams and jellies, baked goods, dessert fillings, and other canned foods. These are sometimes used for feeding farm animals. However, as farmers continue to increase production, this also means more culls. There is only so much demand for animal feed from processors. Therefore, much of this unused fruit ends up in landfills, where it is the end of the line for fresh produce. Throwing away fruit that was grown and intended for human consumption is nothing short of a travesty on so many levels.

Meet Ben Moore

 

Ben Moore is a U.S. Army veteran and a fourth-generation farmer from Kingsburg, California. Kingsburg is a small agricultural town 200 miles southeast of San Francisco. Ben’s family has been farming for over 100 years, growing both conventional and organic produce. Throughout the years, they have grown olives, grapes, almonds, wine grapes, and soft fruit.

 

Growing up on a farm, Ben and his two brothers learned about hard work and responsibility at an early age. Ben recalls a time when he was about 8 years old, and his father kept him and his brothers at home from school. It was the end of the raisin grape season, and rain was forecast for the following day. Rain on grapes during harvest can be disastrous, and his father needed all hands on deck to help finish picking the fruit.

 

Throughout his adolescence, Ben spent his weekends and summers working on the farm, picking fruit, driving a tractor, and pruning grapevines. In fact, during his first year at Kingsburg High School, Ben and his team won the California FFA (Future Farmers of America) state championship in vine pruning. At the same time, Ben won the title as the Individual State Champion. Ben’s father also held the same championship title back in the 1980s.

After high school, Ben left Kingsburg to attend Azusa College, where he graduated and then served in the United States Army. After being injured in the Army, Ben returned to the family farm, where he started his own agricultural trucking company, Big Ben Farms. 

 

Big Ben Farms partnered with local farmers and packinghouses to help them haul away and dispose of the culls, the unwanted, ugly fruit. Every day, Ben hauled several 25-ton loads of imperfect fruit to a nearby landfill. More than 2 million pounds of fruit are discarded in landfills within a 15-mile radius of Kingsburg. Ben knew this was a common practice since his own family had done the same.

However, during the summer of 2017, something changed for Ben. Houston, Texas, and Puerto Rico were both hit by hurricanes. The news reported devastating stories of people in Puerto Rico who were left homeless. Many of these people were without water and food. During that same week, Ben dumped more than 300 tons of edible fruit into a landfill. This made him angry, seeing so much fruit being wasted because of minor imperfections while so many people were going hungry. Ben knew that to make a difference, he had to act. In 2018, he created The Ugly Company.

 

The Ugly Company takes the discarded fruit and upcycles it into healthy snacks. The main reason much of this fruit was discarded in the first place is that it was not aesthetically appealing to customers, hence the name The Ugly Company. The fruit used for these snacks is California-grown and USDA-approved. It is 100% all natural and non-GMO. One package of these dried snacks prevents 1 pound of fruit from going to our landfills. The Ugly Fruits snacks are now sold in high-end retailers and coffee shops throughout Southern California. These can be found at Whole Foods, Erewhon Market, Café Bolivar, Kafe K, Two Cities Coffee Roasters, Hi-Fi Expresso, Two Guns Expresso, and, of course, on the Ugly Company website.

 

The Ugly Company website provides behind-the-scenes videos showing the excessive amounts of fruit being dumped into landfills. These videos also detail why farmers cannot sell this fruit, why it is difficult for farmers to donate their produce to local food banks, and why stone fruit (peaches, plums, and nectarines) is not a preferred compost for growing food.

They also encourage consumers to advocate against food waste and “bring value back to the farm.” Society has a misconception of how fruits and vegetables must be blemish-free. The Ugly Company wants people to understand that this need for perfectly looking produce is contributing to substantial food waste, not to mention lost revenue for farms throughout the country. Ben Moore and the Ugly Company’s answer to food waste may seem like a trivial response to a mammoth problem. However, we must start somewhere, and if everyone contributes, the impact could be significant.

Food loss and food waste are everyone’s problem. We have 37 million people in our country who struggle with hunger. We do not have a food shortage in our country; rather, we have a supply chain that is disconnected. Every year, at least 20 billion pounds of fresh produce is wasted. Farmers are not in the business of growing food only to have it left to rot in a field or dumped in a landfill. Additionally, an enormous amount of resources is being wasted, not to mention the long-term damage caused by rotting produce, which is wreaking havoc on our environment.

For more information on the ‘ugly” solution to food waste, check out the Ugly Company website.