Ben Moore of The Ugly Co. managed to raise $9 million in investor funding for a new packinghouse for his business fighting food waste. One of the investors is Justin Timberlake. Photo contributed

What do Justin Timberlake, a Reedley packinghouse and a Kingsburg trucker have in common? They all want to get rid of food waste.

With celebrity buzz, a $9 million capital raise and a spot on a national grocer’s shelves, a unique local dried fruit processor will get the facility and equipment it needs to expand operations.

In the years since The Ugly Co.’s inception, Ben Moore has gained a lot of interest in his business model. Moore began driving trucks after returning home from the military. He wanted to go back to work on his family’s farm, but his father told him there wasn’t much in the way of work. He began hauling hundreds of thousands of pounds of food waste.

He would grab a piece of fruit headed to the landfill and eat it throughout the day, thinking to himself there had to be a way to put the food to use.

Much of the fruit was cast away simply because it wasn’t attractive enough to end up on store shelves — hence the name The Ugly Co.

That was when he came up with the idea to chop it up into small bits, dry it and sell it.

Four years later, Moore was at a crossroads in his business plan.

The decision to invest in the company’s processing capabilities was a “gamble.”

Advisors told Moore he should expand the brand first, building a customer base for his product.

“What comes first?” Moore said. “Do you have the people that want the fruit or are you going to be able to supply those people?”

Since the company first started collecting and processing stone fruit otherwise discarded, Moore has been contracting with other processors to dry their bite-size bits of nectarines, apricots, kiwis and now cherries.

They were exclusively focused on building their brand and marketing. But they couldn’t produce enough fruit at the right price point to be able to meet demand.

After thinking on the matter, he decided to bring the company’s operations under a single roof. Moore is dedicating 75% of the investment to property and equipment acquisition. He plans to have the facility up and running by April 1.

The Ugly Co. team purchased a 23-acre property in Farmersville to house their operations. They also had to engineer their own processing equipment. One of the biggest problems they faced was having to remove stickers from each piece of fruit. Previously they removed them by hand.

“That’s one of those things that has really limited our ability to process fruit,” Moore said. They shopped around the globe for a manufacturer who could build the designs Moore and his plant manager designed.

They contracted with Fowler-based Packline Technologies, Inc. to create the equipment — 75% of which was manufactured locally, Moore said.

The aim for the fundraise was to get investors whose interests aligned with his own.

“If you’re going to raise investment money, a dollar is a dollar and that’s one thing. But if you can get strategic value and aligned interest across the investors, that dollar is now much more valuable than getting a random dollar from someone who can’t offer anything beyond that check,” Moore said.

His first pitch was with Sun Valley Packing, whose farms neighbor his family’s. Moore had previously driven for the company, and the two families would help one another when orchards were going in. Moore himself often reached out to CEO Casey Jones for advice while he was building his company.

“Ben and his family have farmed next door to us for generations. I didn’t know Ben personally until he was hauling fruit from our packing shed,” said Jones in a news release. “In between loads, Ben often sought me out for help with the new company he’d started. My family invested in The Ugly Co. because we share Ben’s passion for solving food waste at our farm. We also know that Ben has the hand-in-the-dirt, altruistic work ethic that it takes to solve this enormous problem.”

They invested a significant portion of the fundraise. With the help of Jones, Moore said he was able to court other professional investors.

Small farmers and truckers alike had interest in investing as well, he worked with Valley Ag Capital Holdings to assemble an investor fund for the company. Sixty percent of financing came locally.

Moore also wanted an investor who could legitimize the brand. He ended up getting in contact with Justin Timberlake. The pop star’s fund manager had been a good friend with Moore and Timberlake and his kids “loved the product,” Moore said.

Once the equipment is in place, The Ugly Co. will have the capacity to process 10 million pounds of fruit a year over 120 days. Last year, they processed 2.17 million pounds with plans this year to hit 4 million pounds.

In 2022, Kroger held its Go Fresh & Local Cohort — a competition to get local and regional companies onto store shelves. There were 1,000 companies that applied and 1,600 products, according to Kroger.

The Ugly Co. was one of five companies selected.

In five years, Moore wants to reach maximum capacity at his facility and to have expanded either to their next set of commodities or to their next region globally. Moore recently visited South Africa to visit farmers in that region.

Moore said they haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of food waste in the Central Valley. There are still vegetables and citrus that go to waste.

“Wherever food is grown, food is wasted,” Moore said.