40% of everything grown is thrown away. Why? Someone has bought too much. A few percent are bad and everything is thrown away. An aggregate has stopped working in a refrigerated container. Someone has set up rules for what a perfect banana should look like. Yes, the reasons are many.
We handle waste at four different levels: from wholesalers, growers, fruit basket companies and food industries.
In our Fruit Rescue Factory, we sort everything we get in by hand. Separating the bad from the good. It's a craft that takes an incredibly long time (berries that come in 150g boxes are the worst!). From the really good ones, we make juices, shots, lemonades and smoothies. What's not good enough to be food instead becomes soil and fertilizer in our large compost machine.
WHAT IS SAVED FRUIT?
Definition :
Fruit & vegetables that are at risk of being thrown away due to extraordinary situations.
Example: A buyer has purchased too much, products with a short expiration date, a pallet that overturned, a delayed container, a saturated market, an orange in a net that causes the entire net to be thrown away.
Or
Continuous residual flows/side streams from food industries that are not taken care of.
Examples: apple cores from core production, half peas that are sorted out, too large beets, straight bananas.
Why does salvaged fruit sometimes cost more?
The raw material itself doesn't cost much, but the handling does. Ultimately, salvaged raw materials are often more expensive than if we had bought “regular” fruit in bulk.
We have three cost drivers:
- Hand sorting. Everything must be looked through, nets of oranges must be split, bad fruit must be separated from good, berries in boxes must be sorted. The hand application is sometimes extreme.
- Flexibility. We never know when and what we will get in. We work ad hoc and have to be able to handle everything from beetroot in 1000 kg bags to small 150g boxes of strawberries. We are fast-paced and do small series, which in turn costs money.
- Logistics. The raw materials are available in all sorts of places. Wholesale warehouses, fruit ports, farms, fruit basket companies, logistics centers. We have to pick up quickly and be agile.
OUR RESCUE PROMISE
Waste is complex. It is abundant on our planet (40% of everything grown is thrown away), yet it can sometimes be difficult to find or capture.
Waste occurs along the entire value chain, from grower to consumer. Some waste comes and goes, others are more constant. Some players are transparent while others prefer not to say they have waste. Sometimes the waste is far away in another part of the world, sometimes it is just around the corner. Given that waste fluctuates and is sometimes difficult to access, our purchasing process is very different from a traditional food company. We cannot send a purchase order with specific requests and expect to get what we want. We have to hunt, search, ask, think new things, create structures, train and adapt our machinery (so we can save crazy sizes that no one else wants).
Our goal is to save as much as possible, but sometimes we need to buy “regular fruit” in order to save others.
If our sales are out of proportion to what we manage to save, we have no reason to exist. Then we become like everyone else. That's why our range varies. Some raw materials we can always save, while others come and go. Just like waste.
Of the total volume of fruit & vegetables we use in a year, at least 51% is salvaged. In 2024, the proportion was 60% (560 tons).
WE CAN SAVE YOUR FRUIT
We save apples, pears, bananas, citrus fruits, berries, ginger and root vegetables. Do you have anything else exciting? Get in touch, we can create new products.
Do you want us to save your fruit? (minimum 1 pallet) sourcing@rscued.se or 072 898 25 25