28 min
E4: The online grocery store that just raised $16.5M to save the world’s ugly food | Misfits Market In Good Hands
-
- Entrepreneurship
A third of the world's food goes to waste, in large part because grocery stores refuse to put "ugly" produce on their shelves. “Onions that are too small, potatoes that are shaped like your favorite celebrity, and carrots that fell in love and got twisted together.” By some estimates, this amounts to nearly $1 trillion of annual waste and the emission of ~8% of all human-caused greenhouse gases. At the same time, millions of people go hungry every day.
Enter Abhi Ramesh and his company Misfits Market, the online grocery store selling sometimes funny-looking, always delicious produce, designed to break the cycle of food waste and hunger.
On this week’s episode:
- The scale of today's food waste and accessibility problems
- Abhi's “eureka moment”
- Working with hundreds of farms to build V1
- What goes on behind the scenes to enable the customer experience
- Running a massive warehouse and distribution center
- Hiring “Misfits” from the community
- The moonshot and what’s next from here
Lightning Round questions:
(1) If you weren’t working on Misfits, where would you be investing your time experimenting?
(2) What’s your favorite interview question and why? (in context of hiring)
(3) If you could invest in one other company in the industry, who would it be and why?
(4) Who has had the greatest impact on your learning and why?
A third of the world's food goes to waste, in large part because grocery stores refuse to put "ugly" produce on their shelves. “Onions that are too small, potatoes that are shaped like your favorite celebrity, and carrots that fell in love and got twisted together.” By some estimates, this amounts to nearly $1 trillion of annual waste and the emission of ~8% of all human-caused greenhouse gases. At the same time, millions of people go hungry every day.
Enter Abhi Ramesh and his company Misfits Market, the online grocery store selling sometimes funny-looking, always delicious produce, designed to break the cycle of food waste and hunger.
On this week’s episode:
- The scale of today's food waste and accessibility problems
- Abhi's “eureka moment”
- Working with hundreds of farms to build V1
- What goes on behind the scenes to enable the customer experience
- Running a massive warehouse and distribution center
- Hiring “Misfits” from the community
- The moonshot and what’s next from here
Lightning Round questions:
(1) If you weren’t working on Misfits, where would you be investing your time experimenting?
(2) What’s your favorite interview question and why? (in context of hiring)
(3) If you could invest in one other company in the industry, who would it be and why?
(4) Who has had the greatest impact on your learning and why?
28 min