The food waste-fighting fruit and veg delivery box comes to Manchester

Ahead of the UN International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, Oddbox, which rescues and delivers delicious “odd” and surplus fruit and vegetables directly from growers, has announced its expansion into Manchester and surrounding areas, including Stockport, Oldham, Bolton and Wigan.

Oddbox has been operating its weekly ‘rescue mission’ in London for five years and more recently expanded throughout the South and Midlands. It has delivered over two million boxes of ‘odd’ produce (aka the stuff that’s “too big”, “too ugly”, or “wrong colour”) during that time. Having saved nearly 20,000 tonnes of food from going to waste, the equivalent of how much food over 42,000 people would eat in a year, Oddbox is expanding its delivery radius to 2.6m households in the North, with 900,000+ in Greater Manchester.

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions*, which is why the Oddbox mission to help reduce food waste at the farm level is so important. With the climate change crisis only becoming more and more urgent, signing up to Oddbox is a small action people in Greater Manchester can now take to join a growing community making a significant impact. 

If every household in the new Oddbox Manchester delivery area signed up for just one medium Oddbox, together they’d prevent enough water from filling Manchester Cathedral nearly seven times from going to waste; over 665 million litres. In addition, 9 million kgs of carbon emissions would also be saved, which could power 3,000 Manchester homes for a whole year. 

“We’re delighted to be expanding Oddbox into the North of England,” says Emilie Vanpoperinghe, Co-Founder and CEO of Oddbox, “to grow our community of people doing good for the planet and support our growers by rescuing delicious ‘odd’ fruit and veg from going to waste. We’re committed to helping people live more sustainably, and widening our reach into the North means we can have a greater collective impact. Knowing that, according to the Drawdown Project, fighting food waste is the number one solution to reverse the climate crisis, this gives us hope that, together, we will leave the planet in a better place for our children.”

People in the North can order their first Oddbox on Wednesday 15th September at www.oddbox.co.uk. Join the Oddbox mission to ‘Eat good. Do good. Stay odd’ with boxes starting at £10.99 going up to £19.99 for up to four varieties of fruit and nine varieties of veg.