An ethical snack start-up saw the fruits of its labour last week when it began sales of its apple-based products in cafes across London.
Spare Fruit, which sources apples from Kent farmers and turns them into air-dried crisps and juice, has joined the fight against food waste to make sure, as they put it, that ‘no fruit is left hanging’.
The start-up’s founder, Ben Whitehead said: “I got obsessed with the idea of creating products from surplus ingredients and started collecting leftover produce from my local market.
“I was offered twelve boxes of perfectly good pineapples on my first visit, then a wholepalletof grapes on my second. Isoon realised that I was just scratching the surface.
“After dabbling with a few different ideas – and a few culinary trials and errors – I hit upon the idea of working directly with small British farms that struggle to deal with their surplus produce. I managed to persuade some social seed funders it was a good idea and Spare Fruit was born.”
At present Spare Fruit’s crisps and juices are available at just a handful of London-based cafes, including The Cafe at St Paul’s, The Gerard bar at RSA, Even Keel Café at the Cutty Sark, RIBA cafe and RADA bar.
But there are plans to expand to more outlets after this autumn’s apple harvest. The company is also not ruling out working with other fresh produce in future.
