The ugly veg feeding 3 million subscribers - Emilie Vanpoperinghe, Co-founder & CEO of Oddbox

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UKTN

Technology, Entrepreneur, Tech, Business, Hr, Sales, Uktech, Investing, Funding, Entrepreneurship, Marketing

5 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Emilie Vanpoperinghe is our guest this week, co-founder and CEO of Oddbox, a sustainable fruit and veg box that rescues fresh produce - deemed too ugly, too odd or too wrong - from going to waste. Vanpoperinghe talks about bootstrapping her business and crowdfunding over £529k as well as the two rounds of funding that brought in £19m from VCs. She unreservedly discusses how they didn’t really see the value in marketing and branding until Covid hit - when they ended up taking down their website for two months to deal in the surge of growth. Since Oddbox’s inception in 2016, the business has distributed over 4 million boxes, with it’s community rescuing a combined 25,000 tones of fresh fruit and veg.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We were only in London at that time.
0:07.0	And so we thought we need to expand beyond London to the rest of the UK.
0:11.0	There's a lot of demand.
0:13.0	We didn't know anything about branding and marketing.
0:17.0	We didn't really see the value of branding and marketing at that time.
0:20.0	And for us, it was
0:20.9	very much, can we create the proposition and the product? Then the year after, we grew from
0:29.1	60 to 600. So faster, but still, it wasn't a very fast growth.
0:43.0	My guest today is Emily von Popering, who is the CEO and co-founder of Oddbox.
0:48.4	In the UK alone, over 3 million tons of fruit and veg is wasted before it even leaves the farms.
0:52.0	This is because it's either too big, too dinky or because there's too many.
0:54.9	And when food goes to waste, so does all the energy,
1:00.9	water and time that went into growing it. Emily co-founded Oddbox back in 2016 to fight food waste and on the show today we talk about the two years of bootstrapping before successfully
1:05.4	crowdfunding over 529,000. We talk about the two rounds of funding that brought in over 19 million from VCs.
1:12.8	We talk about growth pre and during COVID.
1:16.0	Emily explains how they went from 20 to over 3 million box subscriptions.
1:20.6	I found out why the website was taken down for over two months during COVID to handle the surge in demand.
1:26.8	And we talk about expanding outside
1:28.5	of London. I'm your host Mark McDonough, and welcome to the UKTN podcast. Our sponsors of the show,
1:35.5	Uncapped, believe it's crazy that for e-commerce businesses to fund growth through marketing, infantry,
1:40.7	or hiring, they have to sell equity to VCs, especially when they know they make that money
1:45.2	back right away. Uncab solved that problem. Already helping over 500 businesses worldwide, they offer up to
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