When Lea Brumsack and Tanja Krakowski prepare gourmet meals for their growing Berlin catering business, they go for ugly. Ugly fruit and vegetables, that is. After all, their company's mission is to save misshapen produce – by showing customers they're an attractive choice.
"We don't present the vegetables as waste, because they're not waste," Brumsack tells Guardian Sustainable Business. "It's good food that's even more interesting because it doesn't exist in the usual supermarket and restaurant range. These vegetables are more like pieces of art."
Worldwide, almost 40% of fruit and vegetables will go to waste before they even reach consumers, according to figures from the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). In some parts of the world, that's because there are no efficient means of storing it. In Europe, the reasons are primarily cosmetic. The Soil Association calculates that in the UK, 20-40 percent of produce is rejected because it's misshapen.
That's a problem, and not just because it's wasteful. According to Wrap, the sustainability agency, each year 90,000 tonnes of produce in the UK alone is sent to landfill, where it rots and emits methane into the atmosphere. Wasted food also uses scarce water and land resources. Besides, a quickly growing world population needs the food. The FAO estimates that by 2050 global food production must increase by 70 percent.
Brumsack and Krakowski's business, Culinary Misfits, is part of a new trend to utilise the misshapen produce. Three other young Germans have hit international headlines with their campaign Ugly Fruits, which uses suggestive slogans to attract consumers to rejected greens.
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