Christine Moseley was standing in a field of lettuce when she thought up the idea for Full Harvest.
More than 10 years into a career in the food and logistics industry, she was visiting a farm to research sustainable food systems. That’s when she discovered the lettuce problem. “I sat heartbroken at what I saw,” she says. “They [the farmers] were only capturing about 25% of these big romaine heads and letting up to 75% of the romaines fall to the ground.”
Farmers were throwing out a lot of the lettuce just because it was misshapen. Other lettuces were simply oversupply. “Climate change is happening, people are going hungry, and yet [on that farm], we were wasting more food than we were actually harvesting,” Moseley says. The data backs her up: Around 931 million tonnes of food goes to waste each year, according to a recent report from the UN. She decided to do something about it by creating an online platform that connects farmers directly to commercial buyers who don’t care if their produce is imperfect. A wellness brand, for example, doesn’t need perfectly formed carrots and apples for its smoothies. “We realized that the solution was a B2B marketplace. Just like Airbnb has solved that for excess real estate inventory, the same concept can work for food as well.”
Full Harvest has now expanded beyond surplus and imperfect produce to sell all USDA Grade 1 produce. By digitizing the supply chain, Moseley hopes we’ll see a future where every edible plant is consumed. “We’ve been rapidly scaling,” she says. “Q2, we grew more than four and a half X from last Q2.” Business is going so well that she struggles to identify any real challenges other than the ongoing effort to shift consumers away from their demand for perfect-looking fruits and vegetables.
A fun fact about Moseley: She believes that much of her work ethic comes from being an identical twin. “I’m 6 foot 2 inches, she’s 6 foot 3. She’s an architect, but she’s also in sustainability. I do think there is something to having an identical twin next to you, to compete with, that helps push you to be a better person and be more successful in life.”
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
