A trio of rescue tales.
We’ve been as busy as ever rounding up fruit and veg at risk of going to waste, and there are great stories behind every rescue. Here are a few you might have missed.
One of the fun side-effects from our fruit and veg rescue mission is that we come across all sorts of wonderfully wonky fruit and veg. Even if it doesn’t look particularly odd, we see a lot of variety from week to week, and it’s always really interesting to hear about how each rescued item reached us. So let’s take a look behind some of our favourite rescues in recent times.
The curious case of the mini cucumbers
Things were looking good for our Lee Valley-based grower. They had secured a contract with one of the UK’s biggest retailers, and they were due to supply them with mini cucumbers for the foreseeable future. Naturally, with this in mind, they got busy planting – but then disaster struck.
That contract suddenly fell through, and the grower found out the day after they finished planting their cucumber crops – there was no going back. Our grower was left in the lurch, and their mini cucumbers were left without a home, so loads of food, time, energy and water were left at risk of going to waste.
Thankfully, our grower managed to find a home for roughly 30% of the crop, and we stepped in to scoop up as much of the remaining veg as we could. We’ve rescued over 20,000 kilos so far this year – talk about cucumber accumulation!
Asparagus in need of assistance
It’s always brilliant when the UK’s asparagus season kicks in. A smashing addition to salads or as a side dish, you can’t go wrong with a few delicious spears. The trouble is, supermarket guidelines are plenty strict. If spears are just a bit too thick or too thin – let alone a little wonky – they’ll be classed as “too odd”, and retailers will reject them.
We’ve rescued almost 10,000 kilos of asparagus in 2024, all because it was slightly the wrong shape or size. However you slice it, letting all that food go to waste would cause a spear-iously big problem for our planet.
It’s all going a bit pea-shaped
You’d never expect ‘technical difficulties’ to get in the way of freshly-grown fruit and veg, but that’s exactly what happened when we needed to rescue a whole pile of pod peas from our south coast supplier.
A major retailer ordered loads of pod peas from our supplier, with plans to unveil them as a new addition to supermarket shelves. But out of nowhere, a problem appeared on the system they use for launching new products, so the retailer had to delay the peas’ debut.
All those peas were left at risk of going to waste – that’s the last thing anybody wants. Luckily, we were able to pop around 2,700 kilos of pods into boxes. Hopefully next time it’ll just be a turn-it-off-and-on-again situation.
So there you have it. No matter the reasons behind it, and no matter how suddenly a situation crops up, we’ll always do all we can to rescue fruit and veg that’s at risk of going to waste. That way, we can make the biggest difference possible to our planet – that’s the real story here.
