Fukubuku Food

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  Fukubuku Food

Reason Behind It

Food is an integral part of everyone’s life. We use food for sustenance, comfort, recreation. Over meals we come up with our best ideas, make the most memories, deepen long-lasting relationships. Food is good.

Food waste, on the other hand, is not good. Especially when that food waste consists of food that is still perfectly okay to eat. Of all the food produced globally, 33-50% of it is never eaten, meaning it goes into landfills instead of onto tables. Still, 800 million people across the world do not eat to get the nutrients they need. In a society that has a problem with overproduction, we also surprisingly have a problem with under-consumption.

Translate this to economics. We are wasting food… and wasting money. Not only are we losing the income that would’ve come from distributing that excess food, but we’ve also flushed resources down the drain in producing the food that never gets consumed.

Well, turns out that a large portion of produce discarded by farmers, restaurants, and grocery stores is result of the consumers only buying nice-looking produce. At grocery stores, shoppers don’t pick up produce with imperfections, and those pieces of produce go to waste. Grocery stores don’t take “ugly” produce from farmers even, because they know it will go to waste (and so will their money) if put on their shelves, so farmers end up discarding a lot of produce as well.

Our Idea

Our idea: take that produce that would’ve been otherwise thrown away and give it a home, or rather, a table in a home.

To do this, we partner with local farms, grocery suppliers, and restaurants to re-distribute the food before it is wasted- in the form of produce boxes. You can subscribe to receive various sizes, types, and frequencies of these boxes, or pick them up off the shelf at your grocery supplier’s store or local farm’s site. Everyone involved in this chain- farmers, markets, restaurants, consumers- makes a difference in reducing overall food waste, because it couldn’t be accomplished without everyone in this chain.

Fukubuku Food’s name came from the name of the “lucky bags” distributed as a Japanese New Year tradition, Fukubukuro bags. You never know what’s inside, so it’s a very happy surprise when you open it. Our food boxes are meant to deliver that same type of joy!

Boxes contain an assortment of produce that varies due to seasonality and availability. Included in every box are a couple recipe recommendations based on the box’s contents as well as tips for maximizing freshness and longevity of your produce.

While we’re specifically concerned about the massive amount of food waste across the globe, especially in the US, we’re more broadly concerned about the overall amount of waste we produce. We see it as our responsibility to reduce waste as much as possible in every aspect, so we leave our produce packaged in their natural packaging, not plastic packaging, and add them to a recycled Fukubuku cardboard box.

Everyone subscribing to Fukubuku Food is making a difference in reducing food waste and working toward solving the waste epidemic. When you subscribe, you make a difference.