“I knew my startup idea couldn’t just be another commercial money spinning operation…It also had to in some way help people and also a cause that was far bigger than me” (Deepak Ravindran)
In 2016, Deepak Ravindran, an MBA graduate, left his highly paid job in the City of London to co-found Oddbox with his law graduate wife, Emilie Vanpoperinghe. Both of them had considerable business experience but not of founding and running their own small business. Deepak was disillusioned with his investment banking career and wanted to help people live healthier and happier lives, while Emilie had always wanted to leave the world a better place and had been shocked when she discovered the amount of food waste. So, initially, Deepak set up Fitwhere, a personal training business, while Emilie established Tasty Misfits, a business that packed, sold, and delivered boxes of misshaped fruit and vegetables that would otherwise have contributed to the 30 percent of fresh produce that goes to waste in the UK each year.
While neither business was as successful as they had anticipated, Deepak saw the potential in Tasty Misfits and agreed to take responsibility for its growth and development, while Emilie returned to full-time employment. Apart from having to prove that the concept worked, Deepak spent six months visiting potential suppliers, most of whom needed convincing, managing the business and servicing its customers, as well as having to rebrand since Mars had already trademarked the name “Misfits” for its dog food. With only two employees, the initial two years continued very much like this. As Emilie recounts, “Most evenings and weekends were spent on Oddbox, and we did the packing and deliveries on Friday overnight”.
The venture grew organically with the help of angel investments and £500,000 raised by crowd funding in 2018. During the first 3 weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, sales were 10 times higher than the previous average, and in 2020, revenues increased by 500 percent. By 2021, Oddbox had a subscriber base of some 75,000 customers, employed 89 people, and had a turnover of over £30 million, having rescued more than 35,000 metric tons of surplus food and delivered some 6 million boxes of misshaped fruit and vegetables. In February 2023, it initiated another crowd funding round, raising over £5.3 million from around 2000 investors, bringing its investment total to almost £30 million. Apart from aiming “to save 90,000 tonnes of food from farm waste over the next five years” says Emilie, this round of funding “will also help us reach more people with a broader range of products to suit each person’s lifestyle”.
While each vegetable box saves 13 kgs of CO2 and 1,599 litres of water, vehicle emissions are reduced by delivering over night to their customers, who have saved more than 1 million tonnes of food from going to waste. Accordingly, in July 2020, Oddbox was awarded BCorp status with a score of 93.1 which rose to 97.7 in 2023 after it donated over 358 tonnes of fruit and vegetables to charity in 2021 and its team volunteered for a total of 557 hours working with charity partners. At the end of each week, they donate any leftover produce to FareShare, an organisation that redistributes food to those most in need.
Deepak is naturally proud of their achievements, though he claims to be most proud of “building a 90-member team of mission-aligned people who work so hard and keep us aligned to our mission” – a mission that tackles food waste “in the most socially and environmentally friendly way”. Oddbox addresses SDGs 3 (Good Health and Well-being), 8 (Decent Work and Economic Development), 10 (Reduced Inequalities), 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and 15 (Life on Land). It is a harmonious enterprise with a triple bottom line business model in which profit, planet, and people are in harmony.
References
Devlin, E (2023) Oddbox steps up food waste fight with multi-million pound backing. The Grocer. February 1st.
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