August 15, 2018

Full Harvest, an agtech platform providing a new food supply chain model to mitigate waste, announced it has closed on $8.5 million in funding led by Spark Capital, and including new investors Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Jenny Fleiss, founder of Rent the Runway, Jon Scherr of CircleUp, and Adam Seplain of Marc.vc. Previous investors including Wireframe Ventures also joined the round.

Solving issues associated with agricultural and food waste is becoming a more common theme among agtech and food tech startups and their investors, as the stakes of not doing so become increasingly critical.

The need for more food and higher yielding agricultural production are both immense in scope, however the dynamics of how they interplay are often frustrating. Given global population growth trends, as much as 50 percent more food will need to be produced to feed a world of nine billion people by 2050. However, an astonishing 40 percent of all food in the U.S. goes to waste, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and more food ends up in landfills than any other type of waste according to the NRDC.

The existing agricultural supply system presented a sector in need of disruption and transformation to Full Harvest founder and CEO, Christine Moseley, who told Tech Crunch,  “I found that the biggest problem was the fact that there wasn’t anybody really helping to create a market for and aggregate the supply of surplus produce for these institutional b2b food companies.”

Full Harvest aims to provide resolution by being the only B2B marketplace for the end-to-end purchase, sale, and logistics solution for surplus and imperfect food.

“An astounding amount of produce is wasted today in the United States, but the intuitive and beautifully designed Full Harvest online marketplace is starting to change this dynamic and is already delivering dramatic business benefits for its customers,” said Spark Capital investor John Melas-Kyriazi. “By aggregating excess produce supply at scale and providing a superior user experience to growers and food buyers via software, Full Harvest is shifting the way the industry thinks about how produce is bought and sold.”

Already, Full Harvest has successfully helped large agricultural producers sell and deliver nearly seven million pounds of produce that otherwise might have been bound for the landfill. This accomplishment raises revenue for farmers, saves money for food and beverage companies, conserves enough drinking water for seven million people for a whole year, and prevents 2.5 million KG of CO2E emissions.

By the numbers, Full Harvest helped increase profits for a large U.S.-based farm by 12 percent per acre, reduced the time it took a national CPG to source produce by 96 percent, and saved CPG companies an average of 15 percent on their produce costs.

“We need to move beyond the archaic nature of buying and selling produce to get the most from each harvest and make sure no food goes to waste. Our marketplace will drive a waste-free future on produce farms that benefits growers, food and beverage companies, and consumers,” said Moseley.

“Full Harvest delivers measurable benefits to all stakeholders,” added Dan Phillips of Cultivian Sandbox Ventures. “Farms gain access to a new profit center and buyers achieve convenience and cost savings, all while meeting growing consumer demand for sustainably sourced food products.”

This funding comes one year after Full Harvest raised $2 million in funding led by Wireframe Ventures, Radicle, BBG Ventures, Early Impact Ventures, Impact Engine, and a field of angel investors including Astia and Joanne Wilson, making the company Radical’s maiden investment.

This latest round, which brings Full Harvest’s total capital raised to $10.5 million, will be used by the company to scale up its tech platform, expand its market reach, and to significantly increase the size of its team from 10 to between 30 and 40 people.

“Using this investment to expand nationally and rollout new platform capabilities and produce offerings,” said Moseley, “Full Harvest will get more produce directly from farms to food and beverage producers—faster, fresher, more affordably and with advanced traceability.”

-Lynda Kiernan