Upcycled Fruit

Upcycled Fruit

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

The Ugly Company, a nationally recognized dried fruit brand which uses upcycled ingredients is expanding. Founder Ben Moore, says the business, which started out as just a farm and trucking company, is now taking their processing in-house.

Moore… “By next spring everything we produce will completely be done in-house. And I decided to make that investment because there was two real concerns for me with the existing options. The number one thing was product capacity, so the ability to produce and scale this brand. That’s kind of been our Achilles heel as a brand so far is, we can’t process and produce enough fruit to really grow to put the full force behind this brand and to grow it, so there’s just a bottleneck, and the tunnel’s devoted to dry fruit at the quality that I need. Number two is from a cost structure, with the way these manufacturing plants run, there’s just too many people involved in making the fruit and the batches aren’t big enough, and so our cost structure is nowhere competitive to a raisin at the moment. And really, that ends up affecting the grower; we lose all the value for what could be paid to the grower and inefficient manufacturing, essentially.”

Last month, The Ugly Company received $9 million of Series A Funding, which coupled with their new facility, will address infrastructure needs to expand sales nationally.

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