Small Business: Wonky Box gives new life to otherwise wasted produce

Angus Simms, co-founder of Wonky Box, talks to Tom Raynel about how he and co-founder Katie Jackson are tackling food waste in New Zealand and supporting farmers forced to discard surplus or misshapen crops.

What is Wonky Box?

Wonky Box is a food waste solution. We collect surplus or odd-looking shaped produce directly from our food producers and growers and deliver it directly to homes across New Zealand. We’re a nationwide company, we’re a local business so we work with local suppliers to service local consumers.

Katie Jackson and Angus Simms founded Wonky Box after seeing the scale of food wastage first-hand while working on orchards.

What is “wonky” produce?

It’s our defined term that can be broken down in a quite broad sense. When it comes to produce, it’s anything that could potentially be wasted. So this could be produce that is perfectly fine looking, but simply a surplus.

This particular year we’ve seen a lot of that because in 2024 we’ve seen very few severe weather events across the country which meant a lot of our produce that is growing locally here in New Zealand has actually grown in abundance. It’s too much for the grower to simply throw away after all of the hard work, the resources, and the investment that they put into growing it, so surplus is a big factor.

Wonky Box works with growers all year round that provide produce through the seasons, giving a broader range to provide to customers.

Wonky also defines all of the produce that might be slightly misshapen. It might look a little funny but it’s still perfectly fresh and just doesn’t have that appeal for traditional retailers because of those aesthetics, if you like. It purely comes down to the visuals and sometimes produce is often rejected as a result of that despite it being still massively nutritious and perfectly fresh.

What inspired you and Katie to start the business?

We started in April 2021 about three and a half years ago. We were just coming off the back of a season working in the South Island where we were working on a few orchards and farms including one on the outskirts of Nelson. It was when we were working at those particular orchards or with those growers that we were experiencing first-hand the problem. We were seeing a few incidents in which produce was unable to get sent out from the farm.

Those instances shocked us because we were fine to eat it, and our coworkers were fine to eat it. When we left that summer we were thinking, there aren’t many initiatives in New Zealand that are really trying to tackle this and could there be a way that we can make a bigger impact here?

How big is the food waste problem in New Zealand?

It’s pretty dire. New Zealand’s one of those economies where you’ve got very limited competition at retail and the selection of products that they allow to have on their shelves can be quite limited. When you don’t have much competition, you can dictate all the rules. You’ve got these suppliers, growers that are trying their best to grow produce feeding New Zealanders and a lot of it is just getting turned away.

With suppliers from farms and growers across the country, Wonky Box offers an option for potentially wasted food to be repurposed and redistributed to those looking for healthy foods.

I think ultimately when you look at the bigger picture, New Zealand produces enough food to feed 40 million people. However, there are only 6 million of us here and about a third of the food we manufacture or grow is wasted. Even when you exclude the export markets, which is where a lot of our food gets sent, that’s a huge portion of products that don’t ever end up being consumed because, for some reason or another, it’s gotten lost down the supply chain.

Could you tell me more about your new pantry expansion?

We’re at a point now where we can break into more of the food supply chain. It’s a little bit different in the pantry world. We’re working with coffee producers, chocolate producers, and sauce manufacturers. A lot of these wonky reasons could be things like short-dated products. The product is still perfectly fine to eat or consume, it just might be closer to its best-before date or be in clearance stock.

The coffee manufacturer we’re working with in Wellington has a surplus of 2000 bags of their old branded coffee that the supermarkets don’t want on their shelves anymore, which would simply be wasted packaging, so we’re working to see through a lot of that and things like it.

What is your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?

It’s not just me who started this, it was always Katie and myself, and I think one of the biggest perks is not going alone. I have so much respect for those who do it alone because it must be that much harder. But if you can find people to do it alongside I would highly recommend that. I would also suggest hiring people in the company who are going to do a better job than you at certain things. Be confident that you are putting them in this role because you want them to be doing a better job than you can.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.