A quarter of all vegetables grown in Australia never leave the farm, as stringent cosmetic guidelines for packaged veggies add to Australia's growing food waste bill.
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It's something that 20 year old Solh Peltier-Powell is tackling head on, with his business OddProd, which is now delivering to the Illawarra.
Mr Peltier-Powell, who is in the final year of his business degree, sources strangely shaped fruit and vegetables that would never make it onto supermarket shelves, boxes them up and sells them to households in Sydney and in the Illawarra.
Most of the produce comes from the Flemington Markets in Sydney, where since launching he's now had stallholders and farmers come to him with strangely shaped yet delicious fresh produce.
"A lot of it is carrots that are in funny shapes, like either really big or sometimes really small, or if they've got deformations," Mr Peltier-Powell said.
![Solh Peltier-Powell with the boxes of oddly shaped fresh produce. Picture supplied Solh Peltier-Powell with the boxes of oddly shaped fresh produce. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/123041529/2e200a3d-5173-4533-aca6-c2b76ae2862e.jpg/r0_0_1241_1237_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The business also boxes up apples and oranges with minor scratches, oversized eggplants and conjoined bananas. While some large supermarkets have product ranges of unusually shaped produce, others reject odd-shaped fruit and veg as it doesn't fit within product handling systems.
Mr Peltier-Powell's business idea started from the veggie co-op his parents were a part of growing up. Seeing the impact of cost-of-living pressures on those around him, the Sydneysider decided to try and find a way to get cheap but good quality produce into the hands of families. This led him to the oddly shaped varieties.
While studying full-time, the business has grown in five months to around 200 subscribers, with about two dozen in the Illawarra, and employs Mr Peltier-Powell and two staff members who box and deliver the produce, around 60 per cent of which are odd.
![some of the produce delivered by OddProd. Pictures supplied some of the produce delivered by OddProd. Pictures supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/123041529/8f391e65-f42f-41f4-9e9b-7d9c3cf9b0d8.jpg/r0_0_1920_1080_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Other startups offer a similar service, but OddProd is one of only a select few that make it to the Illawarra.
"A lot of people were saying to me, don't deliver to the Illawarra because it's too far, but it's that too out of the way," Mr Peltier-Powell.
With a solid number of inquiries from the region, the business began delivering and hasn't looked back.
In future, as the business grows, Mr Peltier-Powell said he hopes to use his purchasing power to continue to get costs down.
"The more you buy, the cheaper per kilo," he said. "I'm hoping to bring the price down of each box by maybe $10. At the moment it is cheaper than supermarkets but I want it to be a lot cheaper."
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