As part of Food Waste Action Week, we sat down with Mike Haskamp, co-founder of Angry Monk, a business-to-business market for 'imperfect' fruit and vegetables. Queen Mary is one of their customers, rescuing surplus and wonky produce to be served in the Curve Kitchen on the Mile End campus.
Can you tell us a bit about what Angry Monk does and how Queen Mary fits into this?
The way we generally introduce ourselves is to say that we’re basically like Oddbox, but for hospitality businesses: we identify the fruit and veg that’s at risk of going to waste - sometimes due to appearance, but more often due to gluts and over-supply - and work with chefs and catering managers to rescue it for their kitchens.
Queen Mary has been a fantastic partner for us. University-age students have grown up with full awareness of the climate crisis, and they have the understanding and sense of urgency which society needs to make the necessary changes to fight climate change. We see our role as reinforcing their knowledge and passion by putting the topic of food and how we eat on their priority list. The Queen Mary chefs and kitchen team have been incredibly supportive (and patient!), and they were actually the partners who enabled us to launch daily London deliveries by committing to frequent orders back in 2022.
What inspired you to start Angry Monk?
Although I’ve spent my career working across a number of fields, food has always been one of my passions. My wife’s family runs a sustainable mushroom farm in Australia, and during my time in the US I invested in a small restaurant business whose short menu and kitchen practices result in very little kitchen waste.
Like many people, all the time I spent at home during the pandemic gave me the chance to reflect on my priorities. After leaving Amazon in early 2022 and taking a post-COVID break with my family, it was my goal to shift my career to make a positive difference in the world, ideally by changing how we eat. I was fortunate enough to connect with Andy and Nathan, who had just launched the Angry Monk pilot, and I joined the mission.
Where do you source your unique produce from and how much do you rescue each year? What impact does this have?
We identify surplus in two ways: (i) we’re based out of New Spitalfields Market (just over 10 minutes away from Queen Mary), which throws away an average of 400 tonnes of produce each month. We monitor the market nightly to identify the fruit and veg at greatest risk of being thrown away (e.g. wonky, seasonal gluts, supermarket rejections, etc.), which we then list on our surplus menu for our partner chefs each day; and (ii) in 2023 we began working directly with growers on their outgrades - i.e. fruit and veg that is rejected for supermarket sales during the grading process. We help them channel that outgraded produce to caterers and restaurants.
Since we launched two years ago we have rescued 183 tonnes of surplus produce, with 145 tonnes of that being over the past 12 months. If you translated that into carbon savings, that’s equivalent to driving (or rather: not driving!) 1.9 million kilometers, or almost 50 laps around the equator.
Why the name “Angry Monk?”
In 2019 our co-founder Nathan spent a short time visiting a Chinese monastery and took part in one of their fasts, at the end of which the monks took him to the closest town to celebrate with an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet. A starving Nathan powered through his first two plates and loaded up his third, but found he couldn't eat another bite. One of the monks furiously chastised him for his irresponsible attitude toward food waste and forced him to eat every last morsel before he was allowed to leave the restaurant.
What area of sustainability do you place most importance on?
Not surprisingly, it’s food! It’s one of the areas where day-to-day individual decisions can have the greatest impact. We all have to eat, and several times per day we each make choices that have a ripple effect throughout our food system. Because of that, small adjustments can have a big impact, especially when you compound them across the population. That’s why I feel the Angry Monk mission can be so effective: we’re not asking people to make big changes to their diet; we’re just pushing for people to eat more seasonally and more locally, with a focus on the over-supply of specific fruit and veg that would otherwise be thrown away.
Do you think that customers (for example, in a supermarket) would be unwilling to buy the imperfect produce you sell?
I think the vast majority of people have good intentions and care about the impact they have on the environment, so I wouldn’t say they’re unwilling to buy imperfect produce. I just think that people have become so accustomed to seeing fruit and veg that looks a certain way that they naturally gravitate towards it. So when they’re confronted with a “normal” tomato and a “wonky” tomato in the supermarket, they’ll select the normal one almost every time.
I see our role as normalizing imperfect produce to help people overcome those unconscious biases. And hopefully as people change their buying habits, large retailers will change their sourcing habits as well.
What do you do with produce that is still left over after selling the rest?
For the surplus we identify at New Spitalfields Market, we source it for our partner chefs on a “just-in-time” basis: they order in the afternoon, we purchase it after the market opens at midnight, and we dispatch it via our e-courier Zhero at 5:30 AM. For this market surplus, because we never actually hold any of the stock ourselves, there are never any leftovers.
For the outgrades we receive directly from growers, we carefully manage our deliveries to ensure that there are never any leftovers. This typically means that we will run out of this grower-direct surplus in the second half of each week, but we still have access to market surplus. It took some trial-and-error to get to zero-waste, and during the first few weeks of working directly with growers, we would donate any remaining produce to anti-hunger charities at the end of each week.
Thank you to Mike for talking with us! You can find out more about Angry Monk on their website.