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.
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I think this is a brilliant idea Simon (yes, I know – only one of your many etc etc). Here in little old Mui Wo on Lantau Island, Hong Kong we are slowly working towards the idea of being a Transition Town now that oil has peaked and we neither can nor should depend on oil for – amongst other things – transporting our food long distances.
Rescue Fruit would work very well here too. We have a several deserted small holdings where there are always a few fruit trees; banana, longan, kumquat. Can you come over and organise us? There are at least 10 of us out of 3000 who believe a Transition Town is the way forward.
And by the way – BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!