Online grocery platform Misfits Market will be buying fellow online grocer Imperfect Foods, which the companies say will make for a better and more sustainable experience, a press release said.
The companies said this will help them achieve $1 billion in sales and reach profitability by early 2024.
With the acquisition, Misfits Market will be able to keep working on its mission to improve the supply chain to tackle inefficiency, lower prices and help the customer experience. Imperfect Foods’ work involves selling food which would’ve otherwise gone to waste.
The brands will keep operating separately for now, but Misfits Market founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh will be the CEO of the combined company. And executives from Imperfect Foods will be joining the Misfits Market leadership team.
Ramesh said there was a “tremendous opportunity to advance the shared mission of both brands, which is nothing less than a fundamental re-imagining of both the grocery category and the broken U.S. food system.”
“The strengths of the Imperfect Foods organization, from its in-house delivery fleet and robust private label program to its sustainability commitments and innovation, add immediate scale and depth to what we’re building at Misfits Market,” he said.
And Imperfect Foods CEO Dan Park praised the fact that both companies together had “already rescued nearly 500 million of pounds of food that may otherwise have gone to waste, and driven innovation in a category propped up by antiquated technology and thinking.”
PYMNTS interviewed Ramesh last year, in which he said selling perishables had become easier.
Read more: Misfits Market CEO Says Future of Grocery Stores Is Curated, Personalized and Online
“It was definitely easier [for us to sell perishables] because of our brand, because of what we stand for,” he told Karen Webster in an interview. “Today’s consumer values transparency a lot, especially with food … From Day One, we cared a lot about transparency in the supply chain. We told the story of the apple … And I think that allowed us to build trust with the consumer.”
And PYMNTS has interviewed Madeline Rotman, head of sustainability at Imperfect Foods, who said the idea of the business was to cut out food waste.
Read more: Imperfect Foods’ Three-Pronged Approach To Net-Zero By 2030
She said the company keeps asking, “‘What more can we do to build a better food system?’”
“What that means is saying, OK, great, we’ve done amazing sourcing work and all this revolutionary work to change consumers’ hearts and minds about what food can look like … but it’s not enough,” she said.
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