‘Misfits Market' aims to tackle food waste

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) - Just because produce looks funny doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious and nutritious or that it should be thrown out.

That’s the message being spread by Abhi Ramesh, the founder of Misfits Market, a subscription service that buys imperfect or excess organic produce from farms around the nation and sells it to customers for a fraction of what they’d pay at the grocery store.

“It’s stuff that’s too small, too large, maybe a little bit scarred of aesthetically unappealing, there may be too much of it and that produce goes to waste in thousands of farms across the country, so we rescue it, put it in household sized boxes and ship it directly to people’s doorsteps,” Ramesh said.

Ramesh says that the goal of Misfits Market is to help break the cycle of food waste in the United States. According to the USDA, Americans wasted approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010.

The smaller, “Mischief” box from Misfits Market costs just $19 a week, while the larger “Madness” box, with enough produce for roughly five people a week, costs $34. It has roughly 10,000 customers in the NY-Metro area already, and aims to ship its “funny-looking” produce nationwide in the near future.