The first B2B marketplace that gives every grade of produce - perfect, surplus, and imperfect alike - a buyer, so less food rots in the field.
Here is a fact about lettuce that is also a fact about capitalism. When Christine Moseley walked through a romaine field around 2014, she watched the pickers take about a quarter of the plant - the tidy pale heart a grocery shopper expects - and leave the rest on the ground. The remaining 75% was not rotten, or poisoned, or dangerous. It was simply the wrong shape to sell to a supermarket that had trained everyone, including the farmer, to believe food should be photogenic. So it stayed in the dirt, and the farmer ate the loss, and the shopper paid more for the quarter that survived.
Multiply that by every field in the country and you get the number Full Harvest likes to quote: more than 25% of edible produce never leaves the farm. Globally, the company frames food waste as a roughly $2.6 trillion problem, of which farm-level loss is the least glamorous and most fixable slice. The waste is not a mystery of technology or biology. It is a marketplace failure. There simply was no easy, standardized, online place for a grower with a truckload of slightly-too-curvy carrots to find a juice company that would happily pulp them.
Moseley - who had spent more than a decade at large operators like Maersk and Procter & Gamble, then helped scale the cold-pressed juice pioneer Organic Avenue - noticed something that sounds obvious once you say it out loud. The produce trade, a business measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, still ran on phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes while nearly every other industry had moved online. Her observation was less "food is broken" and more "food never got the software update." In 2015 she founded Full Harvest in San Francisco to write it.
The pitch to investors was not, strictly, about ugly vegetables. Ugly vegetables were the wedge. The pitch was about the last major supply chain still operating offline - and about the person willing to spend years walking farm fields to digitize it. That framing is why a food-waste startup ended up raising roughly $45 million from technology and impact investors who do not typically think about romaine.
Full Harvest reports these figures from early customer engagements. Treat them as directional rather than audited - the company sells efficiency, and efficiency is easiest to prove one relationship at a time. Still, the shape of the claim is coherent: connect a grower who would otherwise dump product to a buyer who would otherwise pay a premium, and both sides can win while the landfill loses.
At its core Full Harvest is a two-sided B2B marketplace. On one side are growers - names like Tanimura & Antle, Church Brothers and Deardorff Farms - with produce to move, including surplus and off-grade product that traditional channels ignore. On the other are commercial buyers: food and beverage companies, CPG brands and processors such as Danone North America, Health-Ade and SVZ, who need volume and are less fussy about a carrot's silhouette.
The platform standardizes what used to be an artisanal negotiation. Instead of a buyer calling six brokers and a grower calling four juice plants, both meet in one digital catalog with grades, specs and logistics attached. The value is boring in the best way: less time, less phone tag, less spoilage, a wider set of SKUs, and a paper trail.
In 2023 the company widened the aperture. Having started with surplus and imperfect produce, it expanded the marketplace to include full-quality USDA Grade 1 produce too. The message to buyers shifted from "buy our seconds" to "buy all of it here" - a subtle but important move, because a marketplace that only sells the leftovers is a niche, while a marketplace that sells everything is infrastructure.
The economics are refreshingly non-zero-sum. Growers capture revenue from produce that used to be a sunk cost. Buyers save on price and time. And because food waste is estimated to drive around 10% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, every truckload rerouted from the field to a factory is a small, unglamorous climate transaction - the kind that shows up on a purchase order rather than a press release.
The founding product: an online marketplace connecting growers with commercial buyers for produce of all grades, surplus and imperfect included.
Launched 2016Broadened beyond seconds to full-quality produce, positioning the platform as a single procurement channel for buyers.
Announced 2023An agentic orchestration layer that applies a decade of produce data and network relationships to coordinate a fragmented, manual supply chain.
Emerging 2025Moseley holds an MBA from Wharton and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and spent more than 15 years in food and operations before Full Harvest. The interesting thing about her story is not the credentials but the timeframe. She moved to California in 2014, relocated her life around a problem most investors could not see, and then spent years persuading a phone-and-fax industry to try a browser. That is a long time to be early.
The market rewarded the patience with recognition - she has been named an Inc. Top 100 Female Founder and, by Fortune, the #2 Most Innovative Woman in Food & Drink - and, more usefully, with capital. But the more durable asset she built was not a brand. It was, as the company now describes it, "the deepest dataset and the strongest network in North American fresh produce." Which turns out to be exactly the kind of thing you want if the next act is artificial intelligence.
| Round | Amount | When | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$2M | 2016-2017 | Cultivian Sandbox, Astia Angels |
| Series A | $8.5M | Aug 2018 | Spark Capital (lead), Cultivian Sandbox, Astia Fund |
| Series B | $23M → ~$28M | Dec 2021 | Telus Ventures (lead), Rethink Impact, Citi Impact, Portfolia, Spark Capital, Radicle Growth, Rabobank, JAL Innovation Fund |
The names tell the story better than the totals. A Series A led by Spark Capital - a firm better known for consumer technology than carrots - signaled that Full Harvest read as a software company that happened to sell produce. The Series B, led by Telus Ventures with impact funds, an airline innovation fund and Rabobank alongside, extended from $23 million to about $28 million and read as a bet that the digitization thesis could scale nationally.
Company-reported figures from early engagements, shown for shape rather than as guarantees. The through-line: a marketplace's job is to make a transaction that should exist actually happen, and Full Harvest's numbers are all versions of "a good trade that used to be too hard."
A marketplace's quiet secret is that the listings were never the moat. The moat was the data underneath - who grows what, when, at what quality, for whom, at what price - and the relationships that make a grower pick up the phone. Full Harvest spent nearly a decade accumulating both. Its latest positioning, under the FullHarvest.ai banner, treats that as raw material for something larger.
The company describes the food supply chain the way an engineer describes a legacy system: "volatile, fragmented, and manual." Its answer is an "agentic intelligence layer that orchestrates it" - software agents coordinating the messy, perishable, weather-dependent choreography of moving food from field to factory. It is an ambitious reframe, and a fair one to be skeptical of; orchestrating a tomato is harder than orchestrating an API call, because tomatoes rot and trucks are late. But if any team has earned the right to try, it is one holding a decade of ground truth about what actually happens on the farm.
Christine Moseley watches most of a romaine field left unharvested and imagines a market for the rest.
Incorporated in San Francisco to digitize the produce supply chain.
The first online B2B marketplace connecting growers with commercial produce buyers.
Spark Capital leads a round to scale the marketplace and attack food waste.
Telus Ventures leads; the round later extends to about $28M with Rabobank and JAL.
The marketplace widens to full-quality produce, not just surplus and imperfect.
Reframes around agentic orchestration for the food supply chain.
The whole company traces back to one field where ~75% of the romaine was being left on the ground for cosmetic reasons.
Moseley honed the problem while scaling cold-pressed pioneer Organic Avenue, where perfect produce meant painful costs.
Food waste is ~10% of global greenhouse emissions; Full Harvest's climate impact rides on purchase orders, not pledges.
Danone North America, Health-Ade and SVZ have sourced through the platform; growers include Tanimura & Antle.
Christine Moseley: Inc. Top 100 Female Founder and Fortune's #2 Most Innovative Woman in Food & Drink.
"Agentic Orchestration for The Food Supply-Chain" - the phrase now anchoring FullHarvest.ai.
It runs a B2B online marketplace connecting farmers with commercial produce buyers to sell all grades of produce - including surplus and imperfect fruit and vegetables - reducing on-farm food waste.
Christine Moseley founded the company in San Francisco in 2015, after more than a decade in food and operations roles including scaling Organic Avenue.
Roughly $45 million total: a seed round, an $8.5M Series A led by Spark Capital, and a Series B led by Telus Ventures that grew from $23M to about $28M.
Large food & beverage and CPG companies, processors and growers - named partners include Danone North America, Health-Ade, SVZ, Tanimura & Antle and Church Brothers.
Its latest direction: an agentic orchestration and intelligence layer that uses the company's produce dataset and network to coordinate the fragmented, manual food supply chain.