Full Harvest, a San Francisco-based startup, has raised $2 million in seed funding to reduce food waste at the farm level. Founded by Christine Moseley, formerly the head of business development for cold-pressed juice makers Organic Avenue, Full Harvest connects farmers with food makers who want to buy the fruit and veggies that grocers deem too ugly to sell in stores.
While she was helping grow Organic Avenue’s retail business, Moseley wanted to figure out how to secure lower-priced organic produce. It felt strange that her company was buying picture perfect fruits and vegetables knowing they’d soon be cold-pressed into juices. Organic Avenue also paid a high price for that pretty produce, driving the cost of its healthful juices above $10.
But Moseley’s true a-ha moment came when she was visiting an organic, romaine lettuce farm, she said: “I was standing with beautiful green romaine leaves up to my calves. The farmers were throwing out all these crunchy, green leaves because they were looking for just the perfect heads of lettuce for the stores.”
World awareness of food waste has increased in recent years, partly owing to better tools to study the phenomenon. In 2014, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released startling research that found at least one-third of food produced each year is wasted, and saving just one-quarter of it…