Click here for Part I & Part II

Fighting hunger by reducing millions of pounds of food waste

Evan Lutz is the CEO of Hungry Harvest, a Maryland-based startup dedicated to reducing food waste through delivery and donations of fresh produce. Hungry Harvest sells surplus, “ugly” fruits and vegetables recovered from farmers and suppliers to feed diverse communities throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Because of their outside imperfections, billions of pounds of edible produce get wasted every year—a statistic the company and others like it around the world seek to change. The company recently appeared on an episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank,” where investor Robert Herjavec pledged $100,000 for a 10% stake.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you tell us about your new office space?

EVAN LUTZ: We’ve been involved with Demian [Costa, Managing Partner of Sagamore Ventures] for a while now. I actually used to intern at Under Armour so there’s a few different connections going on. We participated in Cupid’s Cup as well, and we’re graduates of the University of Maryland. MTech is Maryland Technology, they combine engineering and entrepreneurship—a program over at the University of Maryland. We heard that they have half their space they’re not using. We were looking for a new office space. We said, “Hey, what are the terms? What’s the deal?” Basically, our entire team lives in Baltimore, right up the street, so it worked out logistically. It’s pretty close to our warehouse, which is in Jessup, about 20 minutes away. We got on board about three weeks ago and we’re really happy with the space and really proud to be a part of such a developing community such as Port Covington.

Q. How do you balance your social and for-profit missions?

Americans waste $165 billion of food every single year. To put that in perspective, that is $1.50 per person per day. You can imagine going to work and before you go to work in the morning, you pull out the trash can, you take a $1.50 out of your wallet throw it right in trash—that’s how much food we’re wasting every single day. That’s our mission: to fight that food waste. The other half of the mission is to fight hunger. There are so many hungry families in Baltimore. There’s 15 million across the nation, across the United States. That’s a sixth of our population. One of every six people you see on the street is food insecure, meaning they don’t have access to the types of food that they need; and if they do have access, they can’t afford it, because often the most healthy options in a grocery store are the most expensive. Our mission is to fight that food waste, make sure we’re not wasting $165 billion of food every year—which amounts to 6 billion pounds of produce—and to make sure that Americans that live in the greatest country on earth have access to and can afford the foods they need for a healthy, balanced diet.

This business model can work in terms of fighting hunger and fighting food waste with a for-profit mission. We’re not doing this to make money—and making money would be great, there’s nothing wrong with that—but we’re doing this to fight food waste and fight hunger and we want to do that in a really sustainable and profitable way.

Q. Do you have competitors in this space?

A. There are a few different companies doing what we’re doing—well, not exactly what we’re doing in terms of selling or selling ugly fruits and vegetables—there are a lot of companies that are processing it and doing it in different ways, which we think is a great thing, because part of our challenge is market education: teaching consumers that this produce although it might be ugly or a different color or a different shape or size than they’re used to, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not bad, it doesn’t deserve to get thrown away. And so the more companies that start doing what we’re doing, even selling other produce or processing it, the easier sales are to make for us. So, we actually encourage other companies to start making use of ugly fruits and vegetables.

Connect with Evan on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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