FARMERSVILLE ‒ Farmersville-based Ugly Co. continues to expand its eco-friendly footprint, and will be featured in select Walmart stores in the near future.
The Ugly Company produces a range of dried fruits that have no added sugars or additives, making them a healthy snack and a shelf-stable product. The company sells its products nationally already, but the collaboration with Walmart will potentially be the largest retailer so far.
“Big picture: Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world so it’s a huge deal for us to get a foot in the door there,” founder Ben Moore said in an interview with The Sun-Gazette. “We are doing a pilot program over the next 12 months in about 180 stores across the U.S. We are going to get our feet wet here and then next year, we will hopefully be ramping up to several thousand stores nationwide.”
Moore explained that the collaboration with Walmart came about because of a program the retailer is running called Open Call, in which they are trying to source American-made products.
“Open Call gave us the opportunity to get in front of them and say, ‘We would like to get together with you, we are 100% American and Veteran-owned’,” Moore said.
The idea for The Ugly Co. came about after Moore returned from his service in the Army, where he was injured and medically retired. His family operates a small farm in Farmersville, but there wasn’t enough work available, so Moore began driving trucks.
Initially, he hauled heavy equipment but ultimately bought his own truck where he began hauling produce, including so-called ugly produce, fruit with cosmetic blemishes or other conditions that retailers won’t buy.
“I started adding it up and we were dumping six to eight million pounds a year, just me and another truck,” Moore said. “When I am hauling this fruit, I’m eating it, and I’m thinking, ‘Why are we just dumping this out?’”
Moore recounted that when he was a kid, his grandmother would naturally dry fruit on the roof of the house and it made a delicious snack. He realized that if he could scale the process up, the fruit being wasted could be a marketable product.
The business was initially started in Kingsburg. At first, Moore said he had a hard time getting the business off the ground because the fruit being dumped was not being handled according to health and safety standards. It took convincing for farmers to treat the waste as a marketable product, including refrigeration and proper storage.
An additional struggle that wouldn’t be necessarily obvious was that most fruit, even that which won’t go to a retailer, gets a PLU (price look-up) sticker. Removing the sticker is a labor-intensive process that Moore said made the process economically unfeasible. However, he has invested in equipment that removes the label without massive amounts of labor, which has been a key to creating a product line that is sustainable and marketable.
Some of the first retailers to pick up Ugly Co. were health food-based companies like Whole Foods and Sprouts. Moore said the companies marketing these types of products already have a built-in customer base that is actively seeking products that don’t have added sugar and additives. He noted that in the last several decades, there has been a gradual shift in the buying public toward less-processed products.
Moore said his company has set a goal of saving 100 million pounds of fruit a year by 2035. Currently, his company is processing more than one-tenth of that amount.
“For me, it all comes down to saving the fruit and the way we do that is exactly what we are talking about with Walmart,” Moore said. “The number one contribution any person can make is to try one of my products out. I hope you like it, I hope your kids like it. I just ask that people give it a shot.”
Ugly Company will be holding an event with Walmart on Friday, May 29 at 10 a.m. to honor the company as its “Small Business of the Month.” The event will be at the Ugly Co. facility located at 980 Farmersville Road in Farmersville.
“We want and need small businesses to thrive—they’re the backbone of local economies and contribute to job creation, income generation, and economic resilience in the communities we operate,” a statement from Walmart reads. “We love working with small businesses like The Ugly Company and will continue to invest in them so they can grow with us.”
