Imperfect Produce
The name gets right to the point: “Imperfect Produce.” It’s a subscription box service — and what isn’t coming in a subscription box these days? — out of San Francisco that made its first deliveries in the Madison area on May 6.
Imperfect Produce started just over three years ago; Madison is now its 19th delivery city. The concept is straightforward. A team works with farms to source produce that the farmer would not otherwise be able to sell. This might include fruits and vegetables that have some cosmetic flaw, or are too small or large to suit most grocery buyers. It can also help reduce overstock — sometimes “a farmer has just grown too many potatoes,” says Patrick Judge, Midwest director of operations for Imperfect Produce.
It’s been reported that the U.S. throws away 20 billion pounds of edible produce a year — before it ever gets to a grocery store. It’s Imperfect Produce’s mission to get those fruits and veggies on someone’s dinner table and not in a landfill or left to rot in the fields.
There are key differences between this and a CSA box. CSA customers pay upfront and underwrite the farmer; if it’s a bad year for tomatoes, you don’t get tomatoes. With this, there’s no “know your farmer” angle. Imperfect Produce’s product can come from anywhere in the U.S., although Judge says the company tries to stay local when possible — but a lot of product will be coming from California. The consumer won’t know exactly where any given item comes from.
Boxes are available in organic, mixed fruit and veggie, just fruit, and just veggie, and they come in four sizes — small, medium, large and extra large, with the small aimed at 1-2 people and extra large at 6-10 people. Small is 7-9 pounds and costs $15-$17; extra large is 23-25 pounds and costs $39-$43. Delivery is another $5. The boxes are customizable — customers log onto a website and can pick and choose from a list of fruits and vegetables available that week.
Boxes for the Midwest are packed by roughly 100 employees in the company’s Chicago warehouse. The Madison boxes are then trucked to a warehouse off Stoughton Road, where local route drivers load their vans and deliver the produce to people’s front doors. Customers can choose once a week or once every two week deliveries.
Sample produce that Judge has displayed in the Madison warehouse looks perfectly cookable, and anyone who’s shopped at a farmers’ market would not be disturbed by the supposed imperfections. Imperfect Produce has figured that buying through them is 30 percent cheaper than purchasing the same items in a grocery store, but the company’s real selling point is that the consumer is saving this food from going to waste.
Is a company like Imperfect Produce going to take business away from CSA farmers, or prevent donations to food pantries? Some concerns have been raised, but Judge says the company encourages CSA subscriptions too, and notes that the bottom line is that whatever we are doing to combat food waste, “it’s not enough.”
