The Murky Ethics of the Ugly-Produce Business

Do you know what baby carrots actually are?

For me, the baby-carrot jig was up a couple years ago. I’m not sure what I’d believed about them previously: Were they actual babies? Were they a “baby” breed of small adult carrots? I certainly hadn’t understood them to be carrot nuggets, whittled out of big, ugly carrots that many people wouldn’t buy in their natural state.

I’ve never lived in a world that wanted me to think about how the carrots got made. Since the early 1980s, scores of smaller American agricultural companies have been driven out of business or gobbled up by Big-Ag conglomerates. That I hadn’t thought much about my little carrots meant the system had worked as intended for the type of consumer I am (affluent, urban) and helped obscure the leviathan of the American food-supply chain, which includes everything from commercial growers and processors like Dole and Kraft Heinz down to local farmers’ markets and food banks.

But as shoppers change, so must the systems that serve them. Younger, socially conscious, it’s more than half. To combat that, a new class of for-profit start-ups has emerged: ugly-produce boxes. Companies like Misfits Market, Imperfect Produce, and Hungry Harvest aim to fill the logistical gaps and provide new markets for growers by buying up farmers’ “ugly” or excess produce and shipping it directly to your doorstep, often by subscription. They’re the rescue dogs of vegetation.