The Great British Veggie Rescue! 🥕
We all know the secret to a knockout, nutrient-dense Ragu is in the ingredients. Our ultimate line-up?
🫒 Olive oil, onions, carrots, celery, and garlic
🍄 Mixed mushrooms & rinsed green or brown lentils
🍅 Chopped tomatoes, tomato paste, a splash of red wine (or veg stock)
🌿 Bay leaf, fresh thyme or rosemary, salt, and black pepper
It’s a mouth-watering classic! But here is a wild stat for you: every single year in the UK, a whopping 152,000 tonnes of carrots and 66,000 tonnes of onions never even leave the farm. 🤯 Why? Because they’re graded as "Class II"—meaning they are a bit too wonky, too big, or just not "supermarket pretty" enough.
That is 218,000 tonnes of perfectly edible, delicious flavour getting left in the dirt.
Time for some Ample Math 🧮: If we took just that surplus of wonky carrots and onions to make a hearty plant-based Ragu (assuming about 40g of them goes into a standard serving), how much could we make?
That surplus alone would yield a mind-boggling 5.45 BILLION portions of Ragu! 🍝
To put that into perspective: there are roughly 9 million school children in the UK.
With 5.45 billion portions, we could feed EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL CHILD in the country a healthy Ragu for lunch, every school day... for over 3 YEARS straight! 🎒👦👧 (Though they might politely demand a pizza day by year two 🍕😉).
At Ample, we believe food is for feeding people, not for wasting. By buying up this Class II farmgate surplus, we support UK farmers with fair pay and turn those wonky veggies into delicious, zero-additive meal bases for busy kitchen teams everywhere.
Let's put surplus to work.
🚜 Farmers: Got surplus crops? Let’s talk supply!
🧑🍳 Kitchens: Want consistent, prep-saving, sustainable ingredients?
Get in touch today! 👇
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