Charles Koh
Healthy, delicious fruits and veggies for 30-50% less than grocery stores, delivered to your door.
We’re a huge fan of this service and the problem they’re solving. 5 million pounds of food saved, $2.3 million dollars saved on groceries, 252 million gallons of water saved, and 17.2 million pounds of CO2 saved.
With the rise and popularity of delivery services like Amazon Fresh, Uber Eats, Blue Apron, and Instacart, this concept follows the same user experience behavior which will make it easy for Seattleites to adopt.
How does it work?
- We buy produce directly from farms and store it in our local, refrigerated warehouses (most produce is only in there for 24-48 hours!)
- Customers sign up for a box on our website: choose your box size (small, medium, large, or extra large), choose your produce (organic, conventional, fruit, veggies, or a mix), and choose the weekly or biweekly delivery option
- Customize your box: choose exactly what you want from our “menu,” which changes each week. Since our boxes are 100% customizable, you’ll only receive produce you’re excited about
- Easy delivery: your Imperfect produce box is delivered right to your door and we make it easy to skip a week for any reason
- Enjoy delicious fruits and veggies and help fight food waste by saving produce that might otherwise go to waste
Why should people sign up for Imperfect?
- To save money: Imperfect offers fresh produce to consumers for 30-50% cheaper than grocery store prices. This helps make fresh produce affordable and accessible to all.
- To make the planet a better place: We help close the loop on food waste by keeping over 100,000 lbs of produce from going to waste every week. By not wasting this food, we end up saving wasted water, fossil fuels, fertilizer, labor, and land!
- To make their lives easier: We make eating fresh, healthy, and sustainable produce easy by delivering boxes of fruits and vegetables right to people’s doors. This makes grocery shopping and meal planning much more simple and makes cooking with whole fruits and vegetables easy!
- To support farmers for their entire harvest: Imperfect supports farmers economically by helping them get more out of their investment. They are investing their time, money, and soil in growing produce for people to eat. We provide a fair market price for the produce that otherwise would have been written off as a loss or even cost them money to send to a landfill!
- To increase equal access to healthy food: By supporting Imperfect, you are supporting the fight to end food waste and hunger. We are dedicated to helping close the loop on this important social and environmental issue. We proudly partner with community food banks to help fight to end hunger. We donate thousands of lbs of produce every week to organizations like Food Shift, the Alameda Food Bank, Sprouts Cooking Club, SF-Marin Food Bank, The Emeryville Community Assistance Program, 18 Reasons, Bay Leaf Kitchen and LA Kitchen.
The exact cost of a box depends on how the customer chooses to customize it. A small box costs around $12 and a large box costs around $18, with organic boxes being slightly more expensive than the conventional boxes.
Fact: 1 in 5 fruits and veggies grown in the U.S. don’t meet cosmetic standards – the crooked carrot, the curvy cucumber, the undersized apple – usually causing them to go to waste. We’re here to change that.
Food waste is the low-hanging fruit of environmentalism. We have more than enough food and resources to feed everyone in the U.S. and beyond, so an easy way to fight hunger and help the environment is by wasting less food. Food waste is a sign that our agricultural system is not working efficiently. We have the supply, so Imperfect is working hard to ensure that everyone can have access to fresh produce. We think that by using everything that our farmers grow, even the “ugly” fruits and vegetables, we can feed more people with less land, fossil fuels, and water. Everyone from the farmer to the consumer to the planet wins when we waste less food.
You can take a look at the website here: http://www.imperfectproduce.com
