Fresno County farmer joins a trend in selling ‘ugly’ fruit. Here’s where to find it
“Hello! I’m Ugly.”
It’s not a traditional way to market fruit, but a Kingsburg farmer is hoping those words on his packages of dried fruit will catch shoppers’ attention.
Ben Moore is selling “upcycled peaches” and other fruit through his company, The Ugly Co.
The fruit for sale once would have been dumped and left to rot in a hole about the size of a football field on his property. Instead, he’s selling it under the new brand name, in an attempt to avoid food waste.
The Ugly Co. sells dried diced peaches, and dried and sliced apricots, nectarines and kiwis.
The fruit comes not just from Moore’s farm, but from several farms he works with as part of his trucking business.
“What gets dumped is what’s left over after every option is exhausted,” he said. “I think last year we dumped probably 6 million pounds of fruit.”
There are a lot of reasons the fruit can’t be sold fresh in a supermarket, Moore says. Sometimes it’s bruised or damaged, maybe with just one peck from a bird.
Other times there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just too ripe and won’t last long on a grocery store shelf. Or it could be too big or too small to meet the grocery store standards.
Some of the fruit gets donated or juiced. In the past, when there was no market for it, Moore’s family used to trade the fruit to dairy farmers, who would use it for cattle feed, in return for manure his family would use as fertilizer on the farm.
But a lot of those dairies went out of business, he said.
“The basic economic reality of it is we have a massive supply of ugly fruit and you have very little demand for all of those options,” he said.
So, it got dumped.
“We have a swimming pool of rotten fruit in the back yard essentially,” he said. “It’s now out of control.”
Moore, who returned home to farm and started a trucking company after serving in the Army, thought there must be a better way.
The ugly fruit trend
He’s not the first person to capitalize on the ugly fruit trend.
Back in 2016, the ugly fruit and vegetable trend took off on social media. Stores like Whole Foods committing to sell produce that didn’t meet typical grocery store beauty standards, like a carrot with three legs or an apple that’s a little too squat.
A few years ago, Imperfect Produce began selling its box of less-than-perfect vegetables and fruit box in the Fresno area.
And locally, Del Rey farming family the Masumotos sells “practically perfect” fruit in a drive-thru during the spring and summer months.
A third of food nationwide goes to waste, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That equals about 80 billion pounds of food worth more than $161 billion, says waste services company RTS.
Customers and food companies alike share concerns about such waste, Moore said.
“Everybody’s got a focus on sustainability,” he said. “You also have a really strong consumer base that wants these options.”
Where to buy
There are several ways to buy the fruit, which sells for $5 or $6 a bag, or about $3.50 for a snack-size bag.
Locally, you can buy the fruit in Kingsburg, at Roadhouse 99, Kingsburg Supermarket and The Mercantile.
More local stores will soon carry it.
A slew of stores in southern California and on the coast are selling the product.
You can also buy online. You can buy individual packages or get a monthly subscription box of fruit mailed to you.
This story was originally published March 1, 2021 at 12:19 PM.
