Hungry Harvest has launched its ‘ugly’ fruit and vegetable emojis to spread awareness about food waste.
The US-based food recovery company developed the emojis for use in everyday conversations to highlight that one in five fruit and vegetables go to waste each year.
The emojis have been available on iTunes for free since late September.
Hungry Harvest director of impact Ritesh Gupta developed the emojis, included a wonky strawberry thumbs up and a twisted carrot, and is now pushing a petition to get ugly produce emojis included in Google, Apple and Unicode keyboards.
“We’ve got ‘perfect’ fruits and veggies in our keyboards, why don’t we yet have ones that have more personality, better express our feelings, and help bring awareness to some of the biggest issues of our time?” Gupta told ThinkProgress. “We hope this campaign helps to bring new audiences into the movement, including folks who aren’t as familiar with the food waste movement.”
Hungry Harvest sources, recovers, and delivers boxes of produce to its customers, and donates produce for each delivery made in a bid to reduce food waste.
Around 1.3bn tonnes of food are wasted each year, which is one-third of food produced for human consumption, according to the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation.
