Ever After: A Happy Ending for Food Waste
And the award this year for most wasted food category is…
Fruits and vegetables. Producers throw away 20% of these goods simply because of looks, ripeness, and size.
Who We Are
At Ever After, we are passionate food suppliers who use swarm robotic technologies to save fruits at-risk of being wasted and thrown away because of their appearance or ripeness.
What’s Going On Today?
Our team realized that the first part of the problem is that today’s large-scale farms use limited-resolution satellite and drone technology to monitor how their crops are growing but are unable to really do anything until all of it is picked and taken to the processing facility. Often times when the fruit is picked, it is quickly scanned by the naked eye as “passing” or “failing”. Much of this “unwanted” crop is left on trees, tossed back onto the soil, juiced, or used as animal feed — a wasted opportunity and financial loss.
Our Unique Approach
Ever After developed a dynamic duo (leasable by farmers) known as the Fruit Fly and Beetle.
The Fruit Fly uses hyper-spectral technology to identify crops that meet our needs, geo-tags them and cuts them down (similar to pruning). The Beetle finds these fruits and dehydrates them on the spot — rendering it nearly non-perishable. Working together with swarm technologies, these micro-bots could also have enormous potential with pest and micro-climate monitoring down the road.
These dried goods are placed in gathering points around the field and picked up by our Ever After trucks. Farmers are given payment for our yield and Ever After makes amazingly scrumptious, valuable, and quality treasures with these raw ingredients for online and retail sale.
We are Ever After and we want to celebrate the aging of food and radically elevate the way imperfect and aged foods are valued. We want you to purchase our goods to help save food and give it a second life.
Let’s start a revolution together.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by a Food + Future coLAB Fellow to share their concepts and experiences from the second week of our January 2016 program, focused on the theme of Access. For more information, please visit foodfuturecolab.com/access.
