Full Harvest Gets $23M Investment for Surplus Food Market
B2B marketplace Full Harvest, which works with surplus or imperfect produce, has secured $23 million in a Series B round, per a Dec. 17 press release.
With the funding, Full Harvest plans to continue building its online market, boosting data and market insights offerings and tripling its tech and product teams next year.
Full Harvest aims to move stores’ produce supply chains online into a market where it can be bought by companies in need, helping save surplus food while avoiding unnecessarily sending food to landfills.
The report says Full Harvest’s business model leads to lesser costs and creates a new kind of revenue stream for farmers.
Full Harvest also reportedly increased its revenue thricefold in 2020, and has reportedly sold over 50 million pounds of surplus food. The company also got a boost from the increasing need for better transparency in the food chain.
In the release, founder and CEO Christine Moseley said the company is “transforming a fragmented and opaque offline supply chain into a flexible, transparent, reliable solution,” which could connect growers with various processors and brands through the internet.
The release also quotes Surbhi Martin, the vice president of Greek Yogurt and Functional Nutrition with Danone North America, who said the Full Harvest business model was helping out with the increasing demand for sustainable food options in the public, which businesses were trying to meet.
Sustainability has become a priority for consumers more than ever, both from the threat of climate change and from a renewed focus on being healthier and thriftier with food. Consumers have been looking to buy more plant-based products and have been looking at buying foods that might otherwise go to waste, and both sourcing and packaging are important.
Because of that, venture capitalists have been backing companies offering sustainable solutions, with companies like anti-food-waste tech platform Choco and Just Salad, a New York-based fast casual chain, announcing fundraising over the summer.
Related: Funding Pours in for Food Sustainability Efforts as Consumers Seek Eco-Conscious Options