Toronto grocery service diverting food from landfill

Nearly 60 per cent of the food produced in Canada annually is wasted and a lot of it is still edible when it’s thrown away. A homegrown Toronto company is trying to make a dent in that number.

Grocery delivery service Odd Bunch was born out of a curiosity for how the food systems work in the country.

“We are producing enough food to feed everyone. People are still hungry, yet we’re wasting food and prices keep going up. That didn’t make sense to me,” says founder and CEO Divyansh Ojha.

“So I did some digging — I spoke to farmers, spoke to greenhouses to see what was going on. And it turned out that a lot of things that just didn’t look pretty enough or maybe they had in surplus end up going to the landfills.”

He explains that fruits and vegetables that don’t meet aesthetic standards – ones that perhaps look a little odd or different — never make it to the grocery stores.

Other reasons for produce being rejected include size, quantity and minor imperfections.

“All industries are built around logistics and transportation. However, food oftentimes doesn’t conform to that — you can’t expect a carrot to grow all evenly sized,” he says.

“But to cut down on certain transportation costs … their packaging needs to be uniform. So anything that’s not the right size, not the right shape, has discoloration or is sometimes in surplus, they’re not able to actually package them and send it off to the retailers.”

All of that perfectly edible food is discarded before it ever gets to grocery store shelves.

“The best case outcome there is if they are willing to ship it to let’s say, a cattle farm and it can get used in animal feed,” says Ojha.

“But when there’s two, three million Canadians that don’t know where their next meal is coming from, how is it that we’re feeding cattle? How is it that we’re making that decision?”

Meanwhile the price of food continues to go up. Ojha says their mission is to divert the tons of unnecessarily wasted food away from landfill and onto Canadians’ tables.

“We work with farms, greenhouses, distributors, wherever there is waste, we will go. We prioritize local as much as we can, but we’re in February — so we work with distributors. We bring in products from overseas that they already have and they can’t get rid of,” he explains.

Those products are then curated into small, medium or large boxes based on what is available that week, with options to choose fruits, vegetables or a mix of both.

The menu for the weekly subscription box is updated on their website every Monday and substitution options are available as well.

“Boxes start at $20 plus delivery for a box, which is about 14-15 pounds of fresh food,” says Ojha.

Customers say during a cost of living crisis, that’s much more bang for your buck than big grocery chains.

“Groceries are so expensive for everyone right now and for me, I love to cook and I love to eat well and eat really healthy, and it was just getting way too expensive. So this was a really great option,” says Maureen O’Reilly, a customer who found Odd Bunch through social media.

Ann de Sequeira has been ordering Odd Bunch boxes for a few months and says it provides an affordable alternative to the larger stores.

“The vegetables and fruits that I’ve received have been pretty much the same as the grocery store … if you compare what you can get at the grocery store, you’re saving a significant amount of money,” she says.

Ojha says that’s one of the cornerstones of their philosophy.

“Being able to reduce the price on such a basic commodity on something that everybody needs, it’s very integral to what we do,” says Ojha.

“It’s interesting that the healthy food, the food that’s good for you is always the one which is the most expensive. So the people who are … feeling the crunch the hardest now, you’ll often see them resorting to low nutrition, frozen food, maybe they’re eating very processed food and obviously that’s not good for anyone.”

O’Reilly says there’s no difference in quality or freshness of the produce she gets in her weekly boxes.

“Sometimes you can’t even tell what’s wrong with it. I couldn’t even understand why it would be rejected by a grocery store … it looks perfect,” she says.

She adds that the company’s mission of preventing useable products from ending up in the garbage was also what drew her to the service.

“I love the idea that it’s combating food waste, and that’s such a problem right now in our community and everywhere,” says O’Reilly.

“I love knowing that my purchase is preventing these fresh vegetables from going to waste,” adds de Sequeira.

Ojha says the support from the community has been invaluable and feels the success of the business and its steady growth is concrete evidence that fresh produce and other food can be made available to Canadians at affordable prices.

“We’re living proof that it can be done. And we’re not necessarily a very small scale service now. We service everywhere from pretty much Windsor all the way to Montreal. So we’ve proved this model can be scaled,” he says.

“It’s ironic that a business like this needs to exist. You would think that there wouldn’t be a requirement for that. If the bigger players are able to take pretty much everything that is offered to them and some of the stuff they’re able to discount and just blow out at cheaper prices, then we go out of business and I wouldn’t be complaining.”

In the meantime, they’re diverting as much as 15 million pounds of food annually away from landfills within their area of operation alone.

“I think it is really a testament to [what’s possible] if you prioritize the right things and if you get support from the community,” says Ojha.