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Monticello, Florida — Not every satsuma mandarin grown at Florida Georgia Citrus — a family farm in Monticello, Florida — is the orange of a grocery store’s eye.
“That’s what we call an imperfect piece of fruit,” owner and operator Kim Jones said as he showed CBS News a larger, almost pear-shaped satsuma that would be rejected by grocery stores.
The farm harvests about 7 million pounds of produce per year. But what Jones cannot sell gets sorted into separate bins, where he only has a few weeks before determining what must be thrown out.
The crates, filled with hundreds of oranges, are just a small portion of the more than 20 billion pounds of produce that U.S. grocery stores reject each year because they say they are imperfect, according to ReFED, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing food waste.
An estimate from Missouri-based nonprofit Kanbe’s Markets pegs that amount at a value of more than $17 billion in food waste annually.
This comes as food prices have skyrocketed over the last three years. A $100 grocery bill in early 2022 is now more than $118, according to the CBS News MoneyWatch price tracker.
Abhi Ramesh noticed a problem with the system seven years ago.
“The whole grocery ecosystem’s been built around making sure everything’s perfectly uniform on the shelf,” Ramesh said, noting that the discarded fruits present “an opportunity.”
Ramesh launched Misfits Market in 2018, an online grocery store that buys rejected produce from farmers and packages it in four warehouses across the country.
“When people think about food waste, they think, oh, is it stuff rotting in a landfill?” Ramesh said. “But that’s not it. It is the apple that wasn’t shaped perfectly…At the same time, you have millions of folks all across the country that don’t have access to healthy, affordable food.”
The online grocery store hasn’t yet turned a profit, but Misfits says it has so far saved 200 million pounds of food from being trashed by shipping it to customers across the country.
Jojo Cheng says she started shopping at Misfits about four years ago, where she’s been able to take advantage of the often-discounted rejected produce.
“I find stuff is usually like 15% to 20% off on Misfits versus in the regular grocery store,” Cheng said. “…And you can also get items that you wouldn’t typically see at, like, your local grocery store.”
Cheng says that she now tends to buy most of her groceries online.
“This helps reduce food waste in grocery stores and helps with farmers as well,” Cheng said of Misfits.
Back on the farm, Jones says that any idea that helps save food from being thrown out is a plus.
“You peel all that off and you wind up with a juicy piece of fruit,” he says of one rejected satsuma. “…It’s still got a good flavor.”
