As an 18-year-old in his first year at Western University in Ontario, Divy Ojha became fixated on the issue of food waste in Canada. “A lot of fruit and vegetables in our country go to waste for cosmetics and imperfections, which have nothing to do with quality,” Divy says. His idea was to take the produce that would never make it to grocery store shelves and deliver it directly to customers at a more affordable price.
The idea would help local farmers and distributors sell some of their leftover products while also making fruits and vegetables more accessible for people in need. According to data from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Income Survey, some 8.7 million Canadians were “food insecure” in 2023.
Divy started his first company, FoodFund, without any connections to Canada’s vast network of growers, but his persistence and passion led to him to build relationships with more than 80 growers and expand the business under a new name, Odd Bunch, to benefit both suppliers and customers. Here’s how he did it.
The road trip to relationships
Divy didn’t exactly know what he was getting himself into when he started FoodFund. He would get up every day at 6 a.m. to drive across Ontario, stopping at any farms or greenhouses along the way. “The first few weeks were all about trying to lock in supply, trying to build those relationships, speak to as many people on farms to try and validate that the problem that I was hypothesizing existed truly did exist,” Divy says.
He received enough validation and supplier partnerships in those first couple weeks that he was able to ship his first boxes of produce just seven weeks after he had the initial idea.
The right mix of suppliers
The seasonality of produce was one of the first challenges for Divy’s fledgling business. Some customers might want to order a certain fruit or vegetable that was out of season or already sold out. “Our next problem was to try and create multiple suppliers for each commodity,” Divy explains. Before he knew it, he had a giant database of Ontario farms that could help him get the inventory he needed to fulfill orders.
Rapport before business
Divy said those first few weeks of research also helped him figure out a strategy for approaching potential growers. Instead of going in cold, he often did not pitch the business on his first interaction with farmers or distributors. “I would go and I would just talk to them about how long they’ve been doing it,’” Divy says. He’d ask questions about the business’s history, challenges, and specialties, pay for some product, and leave. Then he would come back a second or third time and ask for their opinion on his grocery delivery business idea.
Divy says pitching was still intimidating, but building that relationship made finding partners much easier. It’s still a strategy he deploys today when visiting his existing suppliers in person. He’ll often have a coffee with them and take the time to learn more about their lives before talking about his order. “The non-business points of those communications are where those relationships are truly built,” Divy says.
The business model pivot
FoodFund had a business model where customers could pick and choose which products they ordered for delivery, but that meant a lot of unchosen produce still went to waste. Demand was difficult to predict, and price was the only lever the business had to help increase it.
So Divy and his team came up with a different business model to solve the original hypothesis, but under a new name and website. Instead of allowing the customer to choose the items in the box, the company, now called Odd Bunch, would decide what produce went into the boxes that week based on their available supply.
Divy says originally he was skeptical of the new business model. He thought people would prefer to choose their own items, but customers said it was becoming a chore to pick. Plus, FoodFund was losing customers every week. “If thousands of people are sort of guiding you in a certain direction, it may not be a bad option to consider it seriously,” Divy says.
Within two hours of launching the new Odd Bunch site, the company had 200 sign-ups, and Divy went all-in on the new model. Now, the company has grown to serve more than 50,000 customers in Canada. And farmers can get their unsold products to more people than before.
To learn more about how Odd Bunch made a successful pivot and incorporated feedback from suppliers, listen to Divy’s full interview on Shopify Masters.
