From Ugly Fruit to Beautiful Snacks: A Conversation with Ben Moore, Founder of The Ugly Company

In this episode of SolPods Studio, host Katie Lockwood sits down with Ben Moore, a Central Valley farmer and founder of The Ugly Company, to talk about food waste, farming, and what sustainability looks like in practice. Ben shares how years spent hauling and dumping unmarketable fruit led him to start a company that transforms imperfect fruit into clean, simple snacks while preventing millions of pounds of food from going to waste.

The conversation explores why perfectly good fruit gets thrown out, how consumer expectations shape food systems, and the contradictions built into modern agriculture. Ben also reflects on sustainability beyond the buzzwords, emphasizing practicality, meeting people where they are, and building solutions that farmers and consumers can realistically support. From farming traditions to real-world problem solving, this episode offers a grounded look at how small, practical decisions can create meaningful impact.

Perfect for listeners interested in food systems, sustainability, agriculture, or anyone curious about how everyday choices connect to larger environmental challenges.

Visit the The Ugly Company website or follow The Ugly Company on Instagram to learn more. 

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Transcript

Opening

Ben: 00.00

What has The Ugly Company done and what have we grown into? We've already prevented 13 million pounds of fruit from being thrown out. That, that was over, that's over two years of me hauling and dumping fruit just myself as a truck driver. We've done that in the history of this business already.

Katie: 00:19  

Hi and welcome back to another episode of SoPods Studio. I'm Katie Lockwood joining you from Colorado Springs. Today I'm joined by Ben Moore, a Central Valley farmer and founder of The Ugly Company, a business tackling food waste and nutrition by transforming imperfect fruit into clean, simple snacks. Ben, thanks for being here. 

Ben: 00:38

Katie, thanks for having me. You're all the way out in Colorado. I'm out here in central California, but it's great we can connect today. Thanks for having me on. 

Katie:  00:44

Absolutely. All right, Ben, let's start with the heart of it. What led you to start The Ugly Company, and what problem were you trying to solve? 

Ben:  00:52

Yeah. So, I mean, you kind of got to look a little bit at my background, right? Um, so my family, uh, we're small farmers here in central California. My family's been, you know, farming for multiple generations. And after I, I had left the, uh, the army, I came back home to the farm and I was hoping to kind, you know, farm with my family here. But, um, just the way of the small-time farmer in central California is, is sort of a relic of the past at this point where there's just not, you know, there's not really very many people supporting themselves. This small kind of 100 acre farmers, right? So, um, I had the conversation with my dad. There just wasn't a ton of opportunity. And so, I ended up um you know, wasn't able to, you know, work on the farm to support myself. And so, I started driving a truck for a local company. Um us as farmers, you know, we've traditionally kind of always had our own truck driving licenses and trucks and things like that to haul our crops. And so I had sort of just took that skill um and and started working uh for another company and then um eventually bought my own trucks and started hauling hauling multiple things but one of the one of the commodities was we'd haul fruit, uh stone fruit from the fields to the packing house and then I'd also would get paid uh by the farmers in the packing houses to haul and dump their unmarketable fruit. 

So that was really sort of the origin of, hey I'm yeah I was dumping about 6 to 8 million pounds of fruit a year um with with my little company. Crazy. Yeah, it sounds crazy, but and which it is, but it's also I mean this is small. We weren't even hauling for like the big packing house at the time. This was like, a, the smaller farms that were dumping that much, right? So, um so I mean yeah, it sounds pretty shocking, but that's just what led me to doing that, you know, load after load, just dumping fruit, dumping fruit, dumping fruit. And it's, it's at such a scale that like most people can't understand because it's, it's just I mean a truckload of fruit is a lot of fruit. And imagine doing that, you know, three, four, five times a day sometimes. And um so that yeah that's basically what led me to start The Ugly Company is you know as the story goes like when you're sitting driving truck or driving tractor you generally have a lot of time to sit there and think and I had a lot of time to think about all this fruit I'm dumping out and I just decided to put my foot down and try and do a little something about it you know. 

Katie: 02:52

Awesome. Yeah. So what was the goal and what were you trying to solve? Why, why fruit? 

Ben:  03:29

Yeah. Yeah. So, so with fruit specifically, I mean that was, you know, that's my background. Um, you know, as as a small farmer and then, you know, that, that's what I'm most connected to in this part of central California. I mean, we really are this, you know, the stone fruit capital of the world. I mean, the most, you know, almost all the nation's nectarines are grown here in this little area. Um, you know, we, we grow most of the peaches in the United States. And so, this, this little kind of, you know, band that I'm in here right now, like, this is where fruit is grown. Um, and so that was the natural progression for me. I was like, hey, this is what I know best. I have very active experience, you know, dumping the fruit out and I I feel like I have solutions that can, that can prevent this fruit from being wasted and so that was just a natural connection, right? Like um because I myself work in the industry and I and I know quite a bit about it, right? 

Katie: 03:44

Totally. Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you for that context. It's really powerful to see how something so practical can be completely transformative. It kind of makes food a mirror of sorts. And I think it kind of shows how we undervalue fruit itself, but also like the people, land, and systems behind it. What do you think food waste reveals about that kind of disconnect? 

Ben:  04:05

You know, it's, it's funny you bring that up because I was I was literally just talking to our plant manager about this yesterday where, um, we got in this all these loads of fruit um yesterday and it was a white nectarine, super tasty fruit and they were all really really small. I mean, they're like I, I don't want to bore you with like fruit size, but they're like 72s, 80s, 88s. Like, so really like for us in the United States, like it's a very small peach. Um, and so all of this fruit was mainly thrown out because it was too small, what we were receiving yesterday. And I, I think back to the times like I've been in European grocery stores and like that really is the standard size of what you would expect a peach to be in their, in their stores is, is that size. So here we are in the United States. were dumping out, you know, this whole truckload of fruit that we received just because it's too small. Whereas in in Europe, like that is the expectation. They, they go into the grocery store expecting to buy a peach of that size. So, it just shows you, like, just kind of the, just the disconnect of how we how, we value things. Um, and you know, I mean, ultimately that there's things you can do to, to grow larger fruit on your trees, but ultimately the tree is going to have small fruit to some degree no matter what you do. Um, and just us as modern consumers don't value that fruit. Therefore, there's no point in shipping it because once it gets to a store, no customer is going to buy it because it's too small, generally speaking. So, um yeah, it's just kind of a funny, it's not funny, I guess, but it's kind, of kind of like an ironic disconnect there of like, just throwing perfect fruit out because it's small, you know? 

Katie:  05:32

Yeah, totally. So, kind of thinking on that with all that contradiction and that crazy disconnect between things just because of our standards, farming itself carries a lot of contradiction. I mean, on the one hand, it's how we eat. people need to eat and agriculture feeds the world. And on the other hand, the very practices that make it possible to eat have also reshaped the ecosystems and erased some of the older ways of life that we've had. Like you've shared with me about how your grandpa used to see salmon in the central river valleys and California once had like the largest freshwater lake before farming and the industry dried it up and that's a big story of loss but also incredible productivity. How do you sit with that contradiction? I mean, farming has both destroyed ecosystems and literally nourished humanity. What can we learn about that tension? 

Ben:  06:22

Yeah, I mean it's interesting because you, you know so really you start with people, right? Because ultimately farming supports people because people need to eat, and um you know and then so Tulare Lake the lake that you mentioned was the largest uh by surface largest freshwater lake west of Mississippi United States. Um, in this day, modern day and age, it's completely dry. There's I mean, there's a few kind of little wet spots and they kind of refill a little bit of it here and there, but I mean, it's not even a percent of, of what it once was, right? Um, that wasn't, it wasn't necessarily just drained for farming. I mean, it was drained for people wanting to have houses. You know, there's, there's a university next to that same river that if that, that river wasn't damned, that university wouldn't be there, next to the river. 

And so, you know, farming is definitely all tied up in, in the, the common humanity of, of how decisions have been made over the last couple hundred years and how we've developed things as human beings. And um yeah, it's definitely an interesting thing because on one hand, as a farmer, your your main purpose is of course to grow something that people are going to eat, but then by doing that, you really have to be a good steward of of your plants and of your trees and and your vines and things like that. So, so, you spend a lot of time and effort to ensure what you're growing is very well maintained. So, you have this connection to nature in a sense and this connection to living organisms. 

Um, so you definitely, you know, you kind of, a lot of farmers have sort of this hippie streak to where like you really do care about, really do care about your plants, you care about what's going on, but then at the same time like, hey, if those rivers, you know, hadn't been damned, you know, 100 plus years ago, uh, we wouldn't be the largest agriculture producing region in the world, um you know by by sales and volume and things like that and so um so yeah it's definitely a contradictory thing, and I think a lot of times farming gets a bad rap but I think ultimately people really need to be introspective about, well if you want to live in a city and you want to have you know you want to have food to eat and you don't want to have to grow your own food and struggle for your own food, it requires farming. 

So um so I think it's yeah it's there's a lot of contradiction there um and it's I never quite know what to think about it because I, I myself love nature, and um I, I would often say this like I really wonder what the central valley of California looked like 150 years ago before cities, before farms, before freeways and things like that because, um it just I imagine it was a pretty. I still think it's a beautiful place, but I imagine it look a lot different and it was it was probably a very peaceful um you know pretty sweet place to be, right? So uh that's totally a lot different. 

Katie: 08:57

It still is. Yeah, just different for sure. How do you define sustainability especially just beyond our environmental lens when it encounters so many more things like our changing ways of life and having to still eat and having to cope with all of these different ways of thinking. 

Ben:  09:16

Yeah. You know, it's interesting because when I think of sustainability, I think it really, on one hand, it's a collective, you know, group of actions that make some sort of an outcome, right? So, as you know, as human beings, we have to do certain things. So, we are not necessarily nuke the planet, destroy the planet, right? Uh but really what it comes down to is it's individual people and individual people's situations and their, their decisions. And so it's it's another one of those interesting juxtapositions of well, hey, you need to you know to be sustainable we need to be able to empathize with people and and really meet them where they're at in life because you know you can see on one hand oh it'd be great if we're like Europe and we all kind of rode electric trains to work and we we walked and we biked and hey that's just not that's just not how it works here in the United States for the most part right and that's just that's not how um that's just not how we're raised and that's not how our infrastructure is built. So, um, you can't sit here and say, "Oh, we got, we got to trash on the people in Central California because we don't have, you know, trains and and like nice things like that to ride." 

So, my bigger point is that's where I just feel like you got to meet people where they're at, um, with sustainability. And, um, it really comes down to, you know, individual actions of what people can support in their daily life because at the end of the day, I mean, we're all we're all working people. We all have bills. We all have priorities and, and finding where you know sustainable living, um, falls in that list of priorities is it's really down to the individual and, and what they can support and you know what they're able to do. So um that's usually how I think about sustainability right is you just try to make the best decisions you can do the best you can and hope that there's good you know good leaders in the industry like you and SolPods that are able to you know to do some larger picture things that make it easier for the people on the ground to to live more sustainably. 

Katie:  10:58

Totally. Yeah. Because I mean the most sustainable thing I think you can do for sustainability is to be practical and reasonable and think about what is actually going to work for you long term sustainably, you know. Because I mean you could, and I think a lot of people do try to make drastic changes, and then find themselves feeling really frustrated when it doesn't quite work out. So, I think that some of the biggest things that we can do for sustainability going forward have to do with practicality and consistency. 

Ben:  11:30

Yeah, absolutely. And that's and that's a big core tenant to you know what we do here at The Ugly Company. So I guess I probably should have mentioned that at some point but we basically take fruit that's, that uh gets to it would normally get tossed out from our local farms because it has you know different cosmetic issues and blemishes and size you know characteristics things like that we're talking about. We make dried fruit out of it. There's no added sugars, no added ingredients and all of our fruit is completely sustainably sourced from farms that the fruit was not going to go to human consumption because there was no marketable demand for it. And so that's a core tenant of, of our brand exactly what you were saying of hey it's about some of these little decisions and these kind of like these kind of obvious things that you can do. And so our, our I built our brand around the ability for somebody to go in the store and at an affordable price get a healthy snack with no added sugars but then also be able to help farms here in central California, uh, prevent fruit from being thrown out. So, you get the dual benefit there of, like, hey, you get a good healthy snack. It's affordable. You're going to have to eat anyway, so why not eat something that's sustainably sourced? Um, and that's that's that's how I look at our brand and that's how I look at, hey, this is something that we can do in our area that, you know, we, we've got the resources and we've got the investment to be able to help other people live sustainably. And that's, that's how I, we're trying to make our mark is just let people make an easy decision to to get a nice snack, you know. 

Katie:  12:43

Yeah, totally. Um, the idea of practicality is something that I'd like to touch on just a little bit more because I know that in your background you've talked a lot about it and just making choices based on real world outcomes and avoiding all this unnecessary complexity and things. How do you think farming and practicality has shaped your life and your like legacy that you hope to lead on a day-to-day basis? 

Ben:  13:08

Uh, it's, it's a great question because farmers and people that work in and around agriculture, I think often the most practical people and what I boil that practicality down with agriculture is that there's in agriculture there's, there's generally there's only binary outcomes. So there's only, you know, success or fail, right? There's no, hey the tree produced this or it didn't, you know, that the quality was this or it wasn't. There's not, there's no like undefined outcomes right. And so just give you, just a, just a very daily example of something practical. So like yesterday, I went to, um, I was going to mow my neighbor's pasture. Um, so I, you know, have some neighbors. I used to, they used to have some cattle over there. Um, and then a different, different group of neighbors bought it. They don't have the cattle anymore. So I just help them out. You know every few months I mow their pasture for them. I enjoy doing it after work. It only takes an hour. So I went to go get my, get my tractor fired up, and I'm sitting there looking at my mower. It has four wheels on the back that you know when I lift it up that the, the mower rides on and one of them is flat, and it's off the rim and I'm like damn, you know, like I was going to use that. So, I got my pickup. I have an air compressor in my pickup, and I was trying to, you know, I was trying to air up the tire, but because it's off the rim, it wouldn't catch the bead. And so, then I had, I had a, like a cup of coffee in the morning in my pickup, and I tried dumping that on the rim to try and lubricate the rim a little bit so that the, um, that the, the, the tire would, would catch the bead. Didn't do that. So, I said, "Okay, whatever." So then I just, then I went and got my forklift, and I lifted up the mower and then I, you know, had a bucket of water at that point, dumped it on the rim. It still wouldn't inflate. So I grabbed a strap out of my pickup and, and strapped the wheel so I could kind of compress that, that tire, and it finally caught the bead and it was great. I inflated the tire and then I found out why it was flat because there's a big old hole in the tire. So then I, having to take off anyways, right? 

So, but, point is like you know that, that's one of those problems that stumps a lot of people and it's, it's no fault to them, right? But a lot of people would be like, "Oh, I have a flat tire. What, you know, what do I do? Who do I call?" Well, as a farmer, like, you're going to encounter a flat tire almost, you know, I mean, almost weekly. I mean, routinely, you're going to literally encounter a flat tire, right? So, just us, as farmers, that we just have that built into us, to solve, to solve basic problems. Um, and there's like, there's binary outcomes like if I don't fix this tire, I can't mow my neighbor's lawn or I can't mow their pasture, right? 

So that's kind of how it's all blended into The Ugly Company, of I've just taken just a very obvious problem here where there's fruit being thrown out. Nobody quite had the solution to, to use the fruit and then we made a very, very simple, you know, very simple snack. It's very healthy, tastes really good, and then it, people can buy it in cities and, and elsewhere and prevent food waste. So that's just kind of how I look at practicality, right? As a farmer and as a business owner. 

Katie:  15:49

Practicality, it sounds like also, not really something that we talked about last time, but it sounds like practicality also has some blend to it, into aesthetics and things that I had never really thought about. I'm currently in a class right now called Atmospheric Biospheric Interactions. And we just spent like a few days going to an apple farm and learning about, you know, should you mow underneath your apple trees or should you not? Um, what is clean cropping? And the farmer there explained that, you know, a lot of farming has to do not necessarily with outcomes all the time, but with aesthetics. How do you see that? And where do you think it fits into the picture with sustainability? 

Ben:  16:31

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I guess aesthetics, that's um maybe you're stumping me a little bit on that one, but um I mean, when I think of aesthetics in farming, I think of the actual outcome of the fruit, and like what it looks like because the nutritional value is the same whether it's got whether it has blemishes or sugar spots or not. Uh, but then aesthetically, people won't eat it if it has those defects, right? That people won't buy it in stores. So, I guess that's one version of, of aesthetics specifically. Um, as far as grown apples and as atmospheric conditions of grown apples, I don't know anything about that, so I'm not going to pretend to pretend to make myself look stupid here, but I can tell you like an example of um, you know, some something that we deal with here in central California for all of our crops is is when it when it freezes. So, a certain amount of cold is good for trees and vines. You know, you you need a certain amount of cold for the tree to reproduce because we call them chill hours, right? So if the, the any given peach tree doesn't get you know 300, 400 5 depends on what kind of tree is you don't get a certain amount of hours below it's like 40 degrees um in the winter then the tree is not it won't reproduce effectively. So, the actually what you eat when you eat a peach that is the reproductive organism of the tree right so right um if the tree gets confused because it's not it doesn't get enough chill hours it's not going to reproduce effectively. Um so that's one aspect of cold weather but then another aspect is um, when we uh, so we need need it to be cold but not too cold because if it's too cold then the tree or the vine's going to freeze and you actually start to lose some of your fruiting wood, um, from the year and if it's a really bad freeze you can actually lose the whole tree.

Um but I, I was looking at planting a specific cover crop um last year and on this ranch I was I was talking to my my PCA and getting some advice because I had never you know planted this specific type of cover crop before and he's like hey you know what you might not want to you might not want to plant that just because of what that grows taller than what you're used to planting and then that will raise your due point your frost point in that specific orchard based on where it is next to the river and stuff like that and so that I mean he was he was teaching me stuff right like you learn something every day um and I was I wanted to have a, you know, a nice cover crop up there to regenerate the soil a little bit. And in that specific example, it was, you know, could have caused a problem, right, where I where I would have risked a little bit more freeze exposure on those trees. So, just interesting stuff like that, I guess. If that has anything to do with aesthetics, I don't know, but it would have looked nice to have cover crop out there, you know. 

Katie:  18:55

Right. Right. Right. Right. No, totally. Kind of off topic, but I thought I would ask. Well, as you know, um, SolPods is very much, so built around students and teaching new generations, especially geared towards college kids. So, for somebody who's listening that wants to create something at the intersection of food, sustainability, community, but kind of feels stuck in all the moving parts because there's a lot. Where would you tell them to start and what was your journey like to get here? 

Ben:  19:25

Well, I, I, I will give what I would think is a practical answer from my perspective. you know, staying with the theme of practicality, but, um, I remember being, you know, being younger college student back then and it was a little different because I was in the army reserves and I was, you know, training to training to go into the army full-time. But um one thing, you know, I think with a lot of young people, what I recommend to anybody is the, the best thing you can do for yourself is to gain a skill and sharpen your skill, right? Um, and so, hey, you might, you know, you might have a great solution or you might have some great idea or something you want to do, but if you don't have that like perfectly figured out of what you're trying to do in your career or what you're trying to do sustainably speaking or trying to marry those two topics, you know, a career and something sustainable together, a lot of people think, oh, I want to start a business. I want to, you know, this and that. 

Well, I think a lot of it just comes down to if you develop a skill at a young age, and you can continue to compound that skill and sharpen it better and better and better. At some point, there's going to be an obvious opportunity that you can use that skill for to do something good with, right? So, I'll give you an example in my personal life, right? Like I told you, hey, I got out of the army. I was wanting to farm, but I wasn't able to do that full-time with my dad. So, I started driving truck full-time. Well, I became an extremely competent truck driver, right? And you think, oh, what does that have to do with sustainability? What does driving truck have to do with sustainability? Not much, right? Well, what led me to starting this business was hauling fruit and dumping it out while driving truck over and over and over. 

And so, that was one of those actual core skills that helped The Ugly Company get off the ground. Uh because the logistics of managing, you know, fruit being thrown out and working with packing houses to make sure that it's simple and easy and that fruit's not sitting out, all these different considerations that you wouldn't think. That was one of my core skills was logistics and driving truck. And so that helped get the ugly company off the ground. And, and you would never think, you know, I never would have thought when I was spending time driving truck and gaining, you know, getting better at that skill that that was going to lead to something sustainable like The Ugly Company. But that's basically what I would recommend. You know, any young person, even an old person, if you're not sure you're trying to do something sustainable, the best you can do is is learn a skill and sharpen it up. And then there will be there could very likely become a time that it's just going to be obvious in your face. How can I use this great skill to do something good? 

Katie:  21:34

I love that. That's awesome. Yeah. Also, I would love to go back just a little bit um and I would love to cut this in at the beginning with SolPods or with The Ugly Company and some of the outcomes that you have seen like what is what has The Ugly Company done? What has it grown into? 

Ben:  21:53

Yeah, definitely. So, you ask, you know, hey, what, what has The Ugly Company done, and what have we grown into? I have a goal on the wall that's, we're trying to prevent 100 million pounds of fruit from being thrown out by the year, uh, 2035, which sounds like wow, that's a huge amount of fruit. It's amazing. Um well, sorry, I meant 2030 actually. I got my numbers mixed up. But, um, but we've already prevented 13 million pounds of fruit from being thrown out. This was, this was, I haven't even got our numbers in from this season yet, but from, you know, the start of this production season, we'd already prevented 13 million pounds of fruit from being thrown out. That's a huge amount. And that, if you actually you just look at on a personal level, um, for me specifically that that was over that's over two years of me hauling and dumping fruit just myself as a truck driver. We've done that in the history of this business already. And so, uh, it's pretty scalable. I think it's pretty important and it's, it's a really amazing accomplishment I think from The Ugly Company. 

Katie:  22:46

Absolutely. Completely, a superpower you could say. And that kind of brings us into our last question that we ask for everybody that joins us. Um, if you could have one sustainability superpower, what would it be and why? 

Ben:  23:05

Uh, so if you're just talking for me specifically, um, I, I think my sustainable superpower is, is just the fact that I understand agriculture as well as I do. Uh because often you know was, you know going back to farming and, and the practical nature of it, I mean it's a tough, it's a tough way to make a living. It's a great way to make a living but it really is tough to, to have a business and stay in business and farms need to make money right at the end of the day. And so really what my superpower in this whole business has been is that because I understand the farms as well as I do and because I can relate to the different farmers as well as I can that's helped us create a scalable business that truly adds value to farmers where they do make money by us working with them, and it's not a burden on them at all. And so that might not be like, hey, like oh my gosh that's doesn't sound like the most amazing superpower, like, everybody want to be invisible or fly or something like that right, but for me having this superpower to be able to go onto the farm and relate to the farmers there and even down to the, you know, any anybody working at the the facilities the plants the farms be able to communicate with them, um, that's something I found honestly is extremely unique in in the general sustainability space because you, you often have like people that are extremely well-intentioned, they really want to make a great but they don't they can't actually fully relate to that farmer that they're trying to help, right? They're, they're trying to prevent food waste, but they can't actually fully understand that farmer. And so that just happens to be my sustainability superpower is that I'm very relatable to farmers and I'm very related to the, relatable to the people, uh, that are involved in this process and that's helped us scale this business and make an impact. 

Katie:  24:37

Absolutely. I would say that kind of going back to your point earlier, you're very gifted at meeting people where they are to create an impact. And I think that that's a big lesson that a lot of people can take in either sustainability or any path of life trying to make a difference. 

Ben:  24:52

So I appreciate that. Thank you. 

Katie: 24:54

Yeah. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, it was wonderful to talk to you today about the contradictions there are in farming and the muddiness that there is and honoring people and our land and tradition that literally fuels our planet. And if people want to learn more, they can visit www.theuglyco.com or follow at packofugly on social media. Ben, thank you so much for being here today. 

Ben:  25:21

Thank you Katie. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your time. 

Katie: 25:24

Yeah, of course.