The Shocking Truth About Produce Waste In America & Fixing The Broken Food Supply Chain Ft. Melissa Ackerman of Planet Harvest
Episode
49 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Health & Wellness, Startups, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Produce waste scale: 400 million pounds of strawberries are discarded annually in the U.S. solely because they fall outside grocery store size specifications — not due to quality or taste. Consumers can push retailers to stock non-uniform "number two" produce, similar to Australia's Odd Bunch grocery model, to directly reduce this field waste.
- ✓Supply chain vulnerability: 60% of U.S. lettuce grows in California's Salinas Valley, creating a single-point-of-failure risk for national supply. Rising input costs — water, labor, international competition with government-subsidized foreign growers — threaten farm viability. Supporting domestic produce purchasing and lobbying against restrictive grading specs helps preserve this concentrated supply base.
- ✓Buying by ripeness stage: Purchase bananas and other produce in multiple ripeness stages simultaneously — one green, one yellow, one near-ripe — to reduce household waste. Match produce purchases to your actual consumption timeline rather than buying uniform batches, which is the primary driver of residential food waste.
- ✓Food as medicine distribution: Planet Harvest builds produce boxes targeting specific medical conditions — diabetes, hypertension, high-risk pregnancies — using Thrive's data to determine which fruits and vegetables belong in each box. These are delivered directly to patients, with physicians tracking health outcomes, creating a measurable, scalable model for produce-based preventive care.
- ✓Emergency relief logistics: Planet Harvest deploys produce boxes within 48 hours of disaster events, sourcing locally where possible — Hawaiian produce for Hawaii relief, for example. Boxes are designed for culturally relevant consumption and no-cook scenarios when power is unavailable, containing 10–12 pounds of fresh produce alongside beans, rice, and shelf-stable milk.
What It Covers
Melissa Ackerman, founder and CEO of Planet Harvest, explains how 30% of U.S. produce never leaves farms due to size specifications, broken supply chains, and financial barriers — and how her company, co-founded with Ivanka Trump, is rebuilding distribution to redirect excess harvest to food-insecure communities.
Key Questions Answered
- •Produce waste scale: 400 million pounds of strawberries are discarded annually in the U.S. solely because they fall outside grocery store size specifications — not due to quality or taste. Consumers can push retailers to stock non-uniform "number two" produce, similar to Australia's Odd Bunch grocery model, to directly reduce this field waste.
- •Supply chain vulnerability: 60% of U.S. lettuce grows in California's Salinas Valley, creating a single-point-of-failure risk for national supply. Rising input costs — water, labor, international competition with government-subsidized foreign growers — threaten farm viability. Supporting domestic produce purchasing and lobbying against restrictive grading specs helps preserve this concentrated supply base.
- •Buying by ripeness stage: Purchase bananas and other produce in multiple ripeness stages simultaneously — one green, one yellow, one near-ripe — to reduce household waste. Match produce purchases to your actual consumption timeline rather than buying uniform batches, which is the primary driver of residential food waste.
- •Food as medicine distribution: Planet Harvest builds produce boxes targeting specific medical conditions — diabetes, hypertension, high-risk pregnancies — using Thrive's data to determine which fruits and vegetables belong in each box. These are delivered directly to patients, with physicians tracking health outcomes, creating a measurable, scalable model for produce-based preventive care.
- •Emergency relief logistics: Planet Harvest deploys produce boxes within 48 hours of disaster events, sourcing locally where possible — Hawaiian produce for Hawaii relief, for example. Boxes are designed for culturally relevant consumption and no-cook scenarios when power is unavailable, containing 10–12 pounds of fresh produce alongside beans, rice, and shelf-stable milk.
Notable Moment
When Chobani's CEO visited strawberry fields with Planet Harvest, he was visibly stunned to learn that the produce he was holding — healthy, edible fruit — was destined for disposal. His reaction underscored how disconnected even major food industry leaders are from farm-level waste realities.
Episode Transcript
The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now, Lauren Everts and Michael Bostick are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Melissa Ackerman is the founder and CEO of Planet Harvest, a profit for purchase company redefining how the country sources, distributes, and consumes fresh produce. So on this episode, we learned all about Whole Harvest, a model that delivers scalable, sustainable solutions to reduce food waste, support the farmers, and increase access to nourishing produce. I found this episode fascinating. With that, let's welcome Melissa of Planet Harvest to the show. This is the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Melissa, what would shock everyone about the produce in America? I think a lot of people don't even know where their produce comes from. They don't realize that it's not from a local farmer or from somebody that's really close to them. It's grown 60% of our lettuce is grown in California, about an hour from San Francisco. And I think the second thing that would shock them is also how much produce is left in the fields. 30% of produce is grown and left in the fields because it's not the right size for the grocery store or the food service industry. To just give you a number, that's 400,000,000 pounds of strawberries that are left in the fields every year in The USA because they're just not the right size, not because they don't taste good. So when there's food shortages in certain areas and you have all this produce left over, why are we not connecting those two things? So that's, like, really what started this whole thing for me. I was on the floor during the pandemic. We're trying to figure out what I'm doing in my bathroom, writing a mom's group, and somebody outraged me just because they said, I don't understand. There's all this excess. There's pictures of, you know, milk being spilled into the rivers and onions being torn under. Why can't we take that and bring it to the food banks? And the answer is the supply chain. It's how does it get out of the fields and moved to places that need access. And because that supply chain just doesn't exist in a way that is coherent and needs to be rebuilt, It just can't move that easily from what is left to being able to get to the people that need it most. And this may be a ignorant comment, but I'm assuming when you say it's not the right size for the grocery chains, is that the buyers looking and saying this doesn't look right and we know the consumer won't buy it because they're looking for something that looks bigger or more robust or whatever, and so they just they don't purchase it because they can't move it. …
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Tools
“Planet Harvest builds produce boxes targeting specific medical conditions — diabetes, hypertension, high-risk pregnancies — using Thrive's data to determine which fruits and vegetables belong in each box.”
company
“Melissa Ackerman, founder and CEO of Planet Harvest, explains how 30% of U.S. produce never leaves farms due to size specifications, broken supply chains, and financial barriers — and how her company, co-founded with Ivanka Trump, is rebuilding distribution to redirect excess harvest to food-insecure communities.”
“Consumers can push retailers to stock non-uniform "number two" produce, similar to Australia's Odd Bunch grocery model, to directly reduce this field waste.”
“When Chobani's CEO visited strawberry fields with Planet Harvest, he was visibly stunned to learn that the produce he was holding — healthy, edible fruit — was destined for disposal.”
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