This is one of my best ideas in a long time. You know about “Rescue Dogs” and you have seen (If you live in Southern California) trees full of fruit in peoples gardens that will go to waste because nobody can be bothered to pick it. You may have seen Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable Miracle about the benefits of organic, local and fresh food.

This idea puts all these trends together. It is a simple idea really: Make Jams, Jellies, Relishes etc. out of backyard fruits and sell them as an environmental alternative to corporate farmed, machine picked, processed and preserved products. Rescue fruit is local, organic and helps everyone in it’s path to your bread.

Rescue Fruit

The flavor alternative in a world gone bland.

RescueFruit.com

The target market would be local high end restaurants and internet sales. It would be necessary to have a really good web site that sold the idea before it sold the product.

A backyard tree with excellent free fruit

The name “Rescue Fruit” is so good that I have violated my own “I don’t do business anymore” rule and bought the name RescueFruit.com.

This is the business plan:

• Year 1 and 2: Make some product and sell it under the FDA small producer exemption, self finance. Work out the website, the publicity, the recipes and the trade dress
• Year 3 and 4: Use investor money to build a small plant and develop markets and systems.
• Year 5: Sell for a lot of money to a big food company.

The business model is Tom’s of Maine or Samuel Adams Beer.