Wonky fruit and veg crisps may not sound like a product that’s going to change the world but speak to the founder of Spare Snacks Ben Whitehead and it’s not hard to see how they can make an important difference.
Using damaged or surplus produce from farms around Europe, the young entrepreneur has developed a range of healthy air-dried crisps that not only reduce waste, but also support growers, raise awareness, and, in a small but meaningful way, help to rebalance our skewed food system. “The food waste problem is systemic,” says Whitehead. “We mass produce food unsustainably and then sell it in supermarkets and hope people are going to buy it. The whole food system has made us totally undervalue food, but we should treasure it.” In 2015 the UK was estimated to have wasted 10.2 million tonnes of food.
Since it started business two years ago, Spare Snacks has rescued just over 100 tonnes of surplus fruit and veg, and it aims to rescue a total of 5,000t over the next five years. In addition, Whitehead has the lofty ambition of raising awareness of the problem among 100 million people by promoting his products and aims through various media. However, the former fruit picker does not lose sight of the fact that the main way he can make an impact is simply by selling lots of great-tasting crisps. “We want to make delicious, quality products that will make people smile,” he says. “We are quality and taste led because I know if people don’t buy our products, we won’t be able to make a difference – we wouldn’t have a mission at all.”
Whitehead says he hopes his adventurous flavour combinations will win more awards this year, having picked up one Great Taste star for his ‘Pure’ range of apple, pear and beetroot crisps. He is determined to continue to grow the business and he recently launched a new range of seasoned crisps in three flavour combinations – pear and ginger, apple and cinnamon, and beetroot and apple cider vinegar. These are available at Ocado, the Co-op, Sourced Market, Planet Organic and numerous independent food shops and garden centres. Ultimately, Whitehead wants to be “mass market” and reach the bigger supermarkets too, saying his “fun, vibrant and accessible brand”, which was recently given a makeover, is “set up for the multiples”.
The brand’s focus is very much on health, differentiating itself from some of its veg crisp competitors by air-drying the fresh produce rather than frying it. This is a process that Whitehead says enhances the flavour and improves the crunch, while retaining the nutrients. “I didn’t want to make a product that’s unhealthy, and juice is pretty much sugar,” he explains. “I wanted to create something pure and healthy that would fit the growing trend in healthy snacking and was sustainable in terms of shelf life.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brand’s core audience is women, many of whom are buying healthy snacks for their children’s lunch boxes. “It’s mainly Ocado, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s mums and your slightly older Co-op shopper,” says Whitehead. “But I think our savoury beetroot snacks also appeal to a male audience – they’re great with a pint.”
The journey to putting these products in shoppers’ baskets has been an intrepid one for the young entrepreneur. Having pitched the idea of selling wonky fruit products to some start-up funders and received a couple of grand to test out his business plan, Whitehead pitched up at St Albans’ street market and waited around at the close of trading to see what he could get his hands on.
“The first time I went I got offered about 120 perfectly fine pineapples, and the second time I picked up a whole pallet of grapes, which weighed about 500kg,” says Whitehead. “The traders laughed at me because I was on my bike, but I took the produce and made some weird and wonderful things to sell in a local shop. I mixed the fruit with granola and cereal to create fruity granola flapjacks.”
This experience taught Whitehead a couple of things: firstly, that there’s plenty of surplus produce out there for the taking, and secondly that there’s strong demand for wonky products. He realised that he’d need to find a more consistent source of supply, however, since if you work with markets “you never know what you’re going to get, and you can’t create a high-quality product from that”.
Whitehead looked further down the supply chain and began working directly with growers. “It soon made me realise that there’s actually a vast amount of perfectly edible produce at farm level,” he says. Indeed, fruit and vegetable farmers responding to a survey by food waste campaign group Feedback last year said they wasted up to 37,000t of produce every year – around 16 per cent of their crop.
Currently, much of producers’ waste is either ploughed back into the soil or sold for anaerobic digestion, animal feed, or at a loss for juice. Whitehead points out that none of these outcomes are particularly profitable for the grower, amounting to a waste of time, money and resources. Ultimately, farmers need to be given an incentive to make use of their surplus vegetables, so they don’t end up simply sending them to landfill or leaving them to rot in the fields.
“For too long the food system has been totally focused on commercial viability and profit and therefore produce just gets discarded because it’s not profitable,” says Whitehead. “Systemic change needs to happen, and that will come about from consumer behaviour, innovators like ourselves creating new products, and investors from inside and outside the industry investing in sustainable brands.”
While Whitehead’s ambitions for his business are apparent, he is also clear that the wonky veg sector must work together if it hopes to significantly cut food waste. “It’ll take a huge collective effort for us to really tackle it,” he says. “We applaud the other amazing brands using surplus produce; we applaud the supermarkets that are selling wonky; and we applaud all the farmers and supermarkets distributing their surplus fruit and veg. But just redistributing surplus produce isn’t a sustainable model because ultimately, it’s just going to put the grower out of business. We need alternatives that pay.”
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