Who would have taught that freshness can still be found in food waste? By sourcing ingredients from things that would otherwise be simply thrown away by many, imagine what that can do in minimizing garbage and addressing hunger. This is exactly what Evan Lutz does through his company, Hungry Harvest. Besides sharing about his delivery service that finds perfectly good food from waste and transforms them into the freshest produce, he also talks about his life as a young entrepreneur. Evan discusses how to find the right mentors and business partners as you evolve professionally (and the dangers of getting the wrong ones), the importance of due diligence, his marketing strategies, and the proper approach to all kinds of feedback.

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Listen to the podcast here

Evan Lutz: How Reducing Food Waste Can Change The World

Evan is joining us, a cool story and a cool entrepreneur. I won’t steal any of his thunder. I’ll let you do all of that, Evan. Please introduce yourself and Hungry Harvest. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it. Hungry Harvest is a produce delivery service on a mission to fight food waste and hunger. We source produce that otherwise would be thrown away by farms, wholesalers and packing houses because of the surplus, sizing or shape. This produce is perfectly good to eat. I first discovered it several years ago when I was taking a tour of a farm back in college. I’ll tell you the whole origin story. We sell that via eCommerce. We deliver in eight cities. We’re based in Baltimore. We serve up and down the East Coast and also Detroit, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte and Miami. I’ve grown it to about 100 employees or so over the past several years and been able to reduce about 30 million pounds of produce from going to waste through this journey.

It’s been fun to start this business, knowing nothing out of college and just being a passionate changemaker and social entrepreneur. I was passionate about the food system and creating my own business and value. Having learned a lot about marketing, management, produce, food chains and everything that goes into building a business for several years has been joyous at all times, but it’s been certainly a good learning experience. I’m happy to share any of those learnings with the audience now and share a little bit more about Hungry Harvest and why we exist.

I want to hear the origin story. I want to hear how you went from a college student to doing this. You said this happened when you were on a farm.

My entire life, I’ve wanted to become a social entrepreneur. I’ve been fascinated by the idea that a business can be used as a tool or as a vehicle to make a positive change. It can be a powerful one in that. I studied Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland. For one of our classes in senior year, we had to start a social enterprise. One of the ideas that I had was I went to a farm earlier in the semester and toured it. I saw a lot of suntan peppers were half green and half red. The farmer couldn’t sell them because they weren’t either green or red. The apples were all different shapes and sizes, but they were perfectly fresh. I couldn’t tell the difference as an untrained consumer, but in the food industry, those are reasons for that food to go to waste and get rejected.

I started little farm stands outside of our student union, selling 5-pound bags of produce for $5. In the first week, I had 20 students. The next week, it was 30. By the end of the semester, we had 500 customers a week. I had 2 interns, 10 volunteers and the whole operation was going. That’s when I was doing research about how much food was wasted in the United States. It turned out it’s a lot. It’s twenty billion pounds every single year. Almost every single farmer has this problem of 20% to 30% of their produce, depending on the year and season, that they can’t sell for what I thought were stupid reasons. I decided to make a change about it and if not now, then never. I started a home delivery company based on that same principle of recovering that produce from going to waste and other items and starting a brand around produce.

Consumers are getting more and more aware of food waste and the things being done by brands to thwart it. Several years ago, that consumer awareness was very low. How much of your early work was trying to educate consumers?

You’re hitting the nail on the head. “Ugly produce” was not a thing back in 2013, 2014. Nobody heard about it. Food waste was starting to get on the radar of some nonprofit and government agencies, but it wasn’t a major issue for a lot of folks that they felt passionate about, especially for the consumer industry. Our first marketing tactic was going door-to-door in a neighborhood outside of Washington DC called Tacoma Park, educating people about food waste and what our solution was. A lot of people didn’t know about food waste. They thought of food waste as things that were good for the dumpster and things that should be composted. They had no idea about the billions of pounds of produce that go into waste that was perfectly fresh and should not have gone to waste in the first place.

We spent a lot of effort doing the heavy lifting in the first couple of years, educating consumers about this issue and trying to convince them to try our products. As soon as they tried it, they realized they couldn’t tell the difference between our product and something they buy at a grocery store. In fact, our products were 9 times out of 10 a lot fresher because we were buying directly from the farm. That was a huge issue for us when we were starting out. We had probably 2 or 3 years before we started to talk to people. They truly understood what we’re doing.

I’m going to start firing into some entrepreneurial questions if you don’t mind. Over the seven-year journey you’ve been on, what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned, things that you’d want other founders and other entrepreneurs to know about that you weren’t aware of when you jumped into this?

Resiliency was the biggest character trait that I needed to learn and to have to make it through here. I encountered many problems that were real world. This is my first job out of school. My only qualification for this job was that I was the one who took that first step and that leap to do this, but I don’t have an MBA. I didn’t have any experience in the outside world. I encountered a lot of problems that I had not experienced before and I still do now. Being resilient, keeping your head cool and trying to solve one problem at a time was super important. I can talk all day on this topic because I’ve learned a lot. I was very naive when I started this business. I didn’t do much besides the passionate part about changing the food system.

One of the other things I would recommend is getting the right mentors for you and also realizing that you’re the only one in your shoes. I took a lot of bad advice from mentors that probably didn’t have my best interests at heart when we first started out. I needed to realize that a lot of mentors will give you poor advice because that’s what they would have done, but you’re the only one in your shoes. They don’t have to deal with the consequences of the decisions you do. Trying to find out who you should listen to and why, and doing diligence on your mentors is important. That piece of advice is a little bit more nuance to find a mentor. Everybody is going to tell you to find a mentor, but you need to find the right mentor that’s going to give you the right piece of advice and that has a vested interest in your success, not ones that will let you make the decisions and you deal with consequences if it doesn’t work out for you.

That’s an important piece of advice and I would also add to that if I may. Advisors and mentors sometimes have a season. What you need in your first year may look very different from what you need in your fifth year. It’s okay to have the business evolve to where that advisor or mentor is no longer as critical or doesn’t provide the same insight that she or he may have a few years back and you have those kinds of candid conversations. It should be a continual evolution. You should always be looking to make sure that you have the right people around you advising you and telling you what maybe you don’t want to hear but what you need to hear.

In addition to that, the brands, founders and entrepreneurs that outperform their peers, one that correlates to that is they’re the ones that have been very selective and very curated, but very much involved in pulling people in with a tractor beam to get them around them and help them to grow their business. I love that piece of advice. I love the fact that you’re going a bit more nuanced into it that you have to do your due diligence. We talk about not collecting vanity advisers just because you want them on a deck for a pitch.

That was another thing where I got a mentor like a professional who told me like, “Get advisors that people recognize. Oftentimes, those people won’t be able to help you because they don’t have a lot of time. You want people who are invested in your success and don’t just look good on the pitch deck. There’s certainly a time and place for those folks, but that’s not the ultimate sign of success.

Most investors know a vanity advisor when they see one. They recognize that it’s complete bullshit anyway. It’s doing more damage than good to you. They want to know that you brought people around you who are going to help de-risk their investment.

Another thing I learned is the same thing you said with mentors. There’s a season for mentors. Year one, year two is different than year seven. That same thing goes for team members. It sounds a little obvious that maybe the people you start out with are not the right people to be VPs, COOs or whatever it might be in five years. It takes learning and watching a company grow. Your skillset as a CEO and a founder also has to evolve at the same pace. A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake that they think the people who are on their founding team are the ones who are going to be the C-Suite executives in ten years.

Oftentimes, it’s not the case because the company grows at a different pace than these people’s skillsets, unless you’re getting a very experienced founder who’s starting from the grounds. If you don’t have that experience as a founder and your cofounder doesn’t, then you should expect to have some tough conversations about maybe it’s time to move them into a different position or maybe it’s time to keep them and hire somebody over on top of them. Those are hard conversations that you need to mentally prepare yourself for and also prepare the team for as well, in terms of career development. It’s setting expectations where people can land on your team when they first start.

It’s different for employee 5 than it is for employee 50. Employee 50, you have a much more structured career path program. You have an HR department, most likely at that time. You have a finance department. You have a lot of things that you didn’t have with employee number 5. You can take a different approach in employee 50’s career development and employee 5’s career development. It takes awareness and recognizing that sometimes your beginning team is not going to work out for the long-term and expecting that. If that’s not the case, good for you, if you found a great founding team. Most of the time, I have not heard a lot of stories like that. I’ve heard many more stories of that not working out than that working out, to be quite honest with you.

Sometimes we force it. The other thing that I’ll say to everybody reading is it’s also why you have to be cognizant and careful about doling out equity to early employees. Many of them aren’t going to have the skillset and the capacity to grow at the speed that you’re going to grow. You want to be mindful. You want to create opportunities for everybody, but not everybody is an entrepreneur. It takes a special skillset, special drive and a hell of a lot of resilience to be that entrepreneur. I’m going to come back to this a little bit. I want to talk a little bit more about going from being just an entrepreneur trying to change the food system to being a leader and a CEO of a company with 100-plus employees because that’s a big difference. Let’s keep going with your tips because these are great.

Another one I found out the hard way is due diligence on your investors as much as they’re doing for you. You need to find out who it is that is investing in your company, and what it is they’re going to be expecting and looking for. We got that wrong a bunch of times. This is nobody’s fault but my own that I didn’t do the right proper diligence and say, “We probably shouldn’t take your money just because we had different expectations in terms of timeline, values or what we want out of the company.” That’s something you can only learn through experience and talking with many different investors, getting in front of as many people as you can. I would also highly recommend pitching people that you know. There’s a 99% chance they’re going to say no. You get honest feedback from them. They’re not afraid to give you feedback.

We didn’t pre-rehearse this because you laid down exactly two of the things I’m saying here all the time. First of all, you have to do due diligence on the investors. You’re looking at it because it’s a marriage. It’s easy when things are going well, but when the shit hits the fan, you want to know who you have alongside you. Whether they’re going to be people that roll up their sleeves and say, “Evan, I got you. We’re going to do whatever we can to help you through this. Let’s put our heads together,” or “Asshole, what are you doing? You’re letting us down. Let’s go. Come on. Fix this.”

Simultaneously, I love the idea of pitching to friendlies, aspirationals or people that you think you’re going to get to know. First of all, you may get surprised. When you think your deck and your pitch are honed, that’s when you want to go in front of those people and find out how wrong you are. When you get questions and things get heated in the right productive way, you’re going to get better at telling your story.

A key part of the diligence period is also negotiating with investors because almost every investment takes a negotiation. Oftentimes, people show their true colors, especially when you disagree. It’s understanding how the investors negotiate. If you can, it’s okay to disagree with an investor as long as you have the baseline understanding of your business, the baseline values, and you know what you want and they know what they want. That’s a foundational key of why they’re investing. That’s important to have. If there’s no commonality between why they want to invest and what you want to do with the company, then the negotiation goes sour. That’s the point when you can say, “This is not right.” If there are disagreements and commonality, that’s probably a better sign than not.

I’ll touch this point a little bit more nuanced. Our most valuable pieces of advice came from investors that we knew were probably not right for us so we pitched them anyways. Some investors say no, but they want to invest down the line. There’s a vested interest there that they don’t necessarily want to give you all the right feedback that you want to hear because they have an ulterior agenda. They want to see something down the line that you were doing. People who are never going to invest, but they are going to tell you why exactly they’re not going to invest and what you think they think you need to do to win. That unvested advice is something you can’t find in a lot of places.

I enjoyed a book, Thanks for the Feedback. It teaches you how to take every piece of feedback. One, to look for the best feedback and see what’s valuable and what’s not. Two, take every piece of feedback, whether it’s valuable or not, digest it, understand it, break it down and use it to your advantage. There are several books that are “business life-changing.” That’s certainly one of them that I would recommend.

Let’s explore that a little bit. One of the hardest balancing acts for any entrepreneur or founder is the balancing act between acknowledging or recognizing productive feedback and nonproductive feedback. If you look at it like a teeter-totter, on one side of the fulcrum, you’ve got malleability and on the other you’ve got perseverance, commitment or belief in yourself. How do you balance that? How do you know when a piece of advice or a piece of feedback, because both are of abundance to any entrepreneur, how do you know which ones to lean into and which ones to discount? What’s your triage like for that?

I think this is valuable. This is a conversation I wish that I’d heard early in the years of Hungry Harvest and what I would have told myself. It starts with finding out a couple of things. One, what are my values? What do I value as a human being and in my business? The second is, what are my skillsets? What am I good at? What am I not good at? From there, you can judge the feedback based on whether it aligns, either values-wise or skillset-wise, with who you are as a person, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO.

My triage process starts with, “Is this person aligned with the values that I bring to the business? What kind of person is it like?” The way I ask that is, “Is this somebody I would go into business with?” If they said, “I’m going to join your team tomorrow. I’m interested in investing in tomorrow?'” That’s the first piece. Gut feeling is a lot of the decision there. There’s not a lot of data you can look at to see what are somebody’s values and how they align with you. It relies on your gut feeling. Finding out who you are defining what you’re best at and what your values come first before you can internalize feedback and who it’s coming. The next step after that is using your gut feeling to say, “Is this somebody that I trust or I would do business with?” There are a lot of people that you wouldn’t. It’s probably not a good idea to take their feedback or take it with a grain of salt. That’s my advice on that.

I’ll add a couple to it. Usually, within every piece of advice, there are some nuggets of wisdom or truth. The hard part is to question, “What did I hear that’s real?” One of the ways that I look forward to my own life is it’s the thing that makes me feel most uncomfortable, causes my hackles to raise or pisses me off. It’s one of those things that I need to explore, sit with a little bit further and be open to. I worked for a guy back in my corporate days. We had a love-hate relationship. He was brutal with his feedback. Much of it was misplaced, yet all of it had some wisdom in it. It took me years to learn to appreciate it, even though it left a mark and I felt bloodied and battered. They were valuable things.

For all of you reading, whether you’re an entrepreneur or just around others, being open to feedback, seeking feedback and being receptive, I believe everybody should have a strong opinion. Where we’ve gone wrong both from a business standpoint and a societal standpoint is that we tether that opinion to our self-identity. Therefore, we hold on to it. If we hold our opinions loosely and looked to be wrong, informed and learn, we’re going to grow and get better. That’s the ultimate goal of being an entrepreneur. It’s a great conversation. Your advice is spot-on.

I appreciate that.

When you started this, your first thing was the mission, which was to reduce this food waste and fix a broken system. Now, you’re running a business with upwards of 100 employees. You’ve graduated from being an entrepreneur, which you still are, to also being a CEO and a leader. What have you learned along the way about the differences between those two roles, even though you have to play them both simultaneously?

From doing the work to managing the work?

Yes, and growing people and culture. There is a lot that comes with leadership that is different from entrepreneurship.

With culture, specifically, I can talk for hours on that. I have very strong opinions that culture needs to start from the top and the beginning of your organization. You need to start with the values that you want to instill and look for in people. That’s going to drive a lot of decisions and save you a lot of time and heartache down the road if you can get your culture. You’re never going to get culture right. There’s no perfect culture out there. It’s always a place somewhere where you can constantly improve that needs to be looked into like that. I do believe it needs to come from the CEO and start from the beginning.

Going back to your original question, “What have I learned from doing the work to managing the work or start going from an entrepreneur, hustling rounds and knocking on doors to get people to sign up for my service that nobody knew what it was to leading a team of 100 people?” First of all, I don’t think I’m the best at this. There are other companies that I can look to that have scaled much faster than us and have been able to hire, put in systems and processes and scale. Even a business that’s as complex as ours, with supply chain, logistics, procurement and all those fun things in the food system, they are much faster than us. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way.

One of them is we have settled for processes and people who fit the moment, but don’t fit us on a 10x scale. At certain times, we’ve lacked the ability to see ahead through the next week and stick to a plan. We had a business plan. We still have one for the next five years. We’ve always had a 12-month, 3-year and 5-year business plan ever since the beginning of the company. Often, during the first few years when was still packing bags, making a lot of deliveries myself, doing a lot of this work and hustling around, I would not stick to that plan. I’ll just be focused on how can I make the next delivery or get through this week. Instead of worrying about making the process more efficient, I was looking at it like, “This is a job. To do this job, I need to do the work instead of my actual job was taking myself out of this, making it more scalable and bringing in people. If I couldn’t, I’ll bring in people that could.”

One of the things I’ve learned is you need to invest in scale. You need to always be thinking three steps ahead. Chess is an excellent game. I suck at chess personally, but using that as an example. In chess, you always have to think ahead of what your opponent is going to do and what you’re going to do 3, 5 steps ahead. I myself is very guilty of this, but it’s very easy to get lost in that cycle of what is the workweek and workday look like and what you have to do instead of, what do I have to do this quarter to make my business double in sales, or whatever goal you might be trying to achieve?

That question is very easy to get lost on because there’s nobody to hold you accountable to it besides yourself. You might talk to your investors once every other week or once every quarter. It’s not often enough for them to remind you of like, “You need to look at the longer-term picture here.” That’s something as a CEO, I need to do more myself, way more often than I did early on. Now, I’m at the point where I have employees and coworkers who are very much partners to me. We are constantly talking about what is the next quarter, next year, next five years look like. That’s the primary role of our jobs. I wish we had done that way earlier on in the business. It’s hard to do that when you’re the ones making the food and doing the actual work. That’s a reminder I want to put out there for all the entrepreneurs who are reading.

You said something earlier in this conversation about the fact that this was your first job coming out of college and you didn’t have an MBA. I want to call out the fact that if you had, you would not have gotten any better education than you’ve received by doing what you’ve done. If you ever went on to teach a course, I’d be all in to go because what you described is one of the harder balancing acts for entrepreneurs. You get mired in the now. You get your heads down working in your business. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a business leader, your real primary value in creating work is done when you lift your head and work on it. You’re looking further afield and planning for what’s next. That’s hard to do when you’re in the throes of what happens. The risk is that it becomes habitual for you. It’s what you get comfortable doing. Over time, you begin to lose your vision and foresight and you wind up getting so transactional. For you to be able to lift up is critical. If we’re talking five years from now, where is Hungry Harvest? Where do you want to take the business?

I want to be in most major cities in the United States. We have a very original expansion model. We’re looking to dive deep into each city, where we’re looking to get a lot of subscribers, partner with local organizations and help out local communities and local suppliers. We see ourselves as expanding city by city so we can best help each localized food system become more whole. Ultimately, what’s going to curb food waste, food insecurity, hunger and get Americans eating healthier diets is creating a much more localized and decentralized food system than the one we have now. That takes a lot of work. The way we’ve done it is we don’t ship boxes across the country. We’re trying to build it city by city. I don’t know how unique our philosophy on this is, but I know it’s different than our competitors.

My goal was never to be the number one in our industry. I don’t want to build the biggest produce company or biggest grocery delivery company. I think that’s probably the result of good work. Our goal is to be the best part of all our different stakeholders’ lives. In terms of our employees, I want this to be the highlight of their career. We’re not going to keep everybody forever. I hope we do, but that’s not realistic. When they look back at their career, when they’re retired and they look back at all the jobs that they did, I want Hungry Harvest to be like, “I did my best work there. That was the most fun culture. That was the best team I worked on.”

It’s the same with the partners we work with. We want to be the highlight of their lives, especially with our customers. We want their experience digitally when they’re ordering Hungry Harvest to be the most seamless app they work with or the easiest ordering system, even easier than Amazon, Airbnb or any of the great companies out there. When they open their box of groceries every week when they get that delivery, we want them to feel good about their purchase like, “Holy shit, this is good for me, the planet and my local community. It’s more than just grocery shopping.”

Personally, I love grocery shopping at certain stores. I love Trader Joe’s and Wegmans. Some of their stores are great. I hate going to Safeway and some other places that I see as a chore. I think a lot of Americans see that as a chore. I want when they’re shopping with Hungry Harvest that this is something that they love. Our NPS score is above Trader Joe’s. It’s on par with a lot of the best organizations out there. It looks like an organization that is the best at in the world in what we do of making customers happy, our employees’ lives better and our communities better. We’re expanding region by region to help curb food waste and food insecurity. That’s a 60-second pitch of what we want to do.

It is somewhat contrarian. If you ask the average person or the average entrepreneur, their immediate answer is to be number one in the market or number one market share. It sounds to me like you’re measuring success by the impact than by the output. I applaud you for that. Somebody came back and mentioned in the comments, “No MBA is required to build a successful company.” I’ll digress and tell everyone a story. When I graduated with my MBA, working for a few years, then going back to school, I came out convinced that I knew everything and I had the keys to the kingdom. I was all-knowing.

One of the students I was in school with, he felt exactly the same. We decided it was time to take all of this theory and all of this great body of scholastic work and put it into practice and start a business. We did and we failed because we followed what was taught. To some degree, the risk is that your intuition is socialized out of you. You no longer have that reflexive ability to make gut decisions and you just do things based on theory.

To some degree, one of my favorite quotes and I’ll probably butcher it, is from Shunryū Suzuki who said, “In the expert’s mind, the opportunities are few but in the beginner’s mind, the opportunities are many.” Bringing that beginner’s mind to entrepreneurship is a benefit. Another question that came in very specific to your business is what has the rapid growth in the flexitarian, plant-based eating lifestyles done to your business or people? Are you seeing your consumers now focused on making what’s in your box center of the plate? Is that a growing part of your consumer base?

We don’t use the V words in our business, the vegetarian or vegan. We have plenty of vegetarian and vegan consumers who use us. We’ve committed to never selling meat or meat products in our line of business. It’s not the future we believe in. We do sell meat alternatives. That has fueled a lot of interest in what we’re doing and standing in our values and saying, “A lot of our employees eat meat.” Most of our customers eat meat as well. We see a future where maybe there’s less meat on the plate and that’s better for the environment. I started this business because I cared about the environment and climate change. Food waste is one of the biggest contributors to climate change as is meat consumption.

While everybody can have their own opinions or strategies on how they consume food, for me, I don’t want to eliminate meat. I just want to reduce it by reducing it by half or by a third of what I was eating before. I learned about how bad it was in the environment. That itself is making a big change. That’s me on a personal level. On a business level, I do think this has helped a lot. There are several waves of food trends that have gone on over the past years, farmer’s markets, organic, eating local. This idea of sustainability where it’s like zero waste, recovering food or you’re buying from farms that don’t waste anything is a big part of these next food trends.

The following one that is starting to come on is reducing meat consumption, which is Impossible and Beyond Meat and all these other companies, and Trader Joe’s is starting to private label their own plant-based burgers. There is a rising trend in reducing meat, which overall is good for the planet. I wouldn’t say our marketing or branding has changed that much because we’ve always been plant-forward, but I think the number of people who are attracted to it has increased. That has shown over the sale. There is a lot of context that’s needed to be given.

One of the things that’s hard for many is we add some rigidity unnecessarily or a litmus test around some of these words. You don’t have to go from being a carnivore to being a vegan to have an impact in lessening your footprint through your diet. If everybody were to be mindful of how their diet impacts our environment, that alone would probably go a long way towards solving the problem. Those who are all-in also need to be appreciative and supportive of those who aren’t all-in but are still working to do what’s right. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing and what you’ve found has worked for you in terms of reaching consumers. How have you been able to do that?

We started by investing in the products and making them something that people wanted to tell their friends and family about. Referrals are how we grew organically. They’re still our largest source of growth is by our customers telling other folks in their circles. Since referral can only take you so far before you need to start advertising in terms of awareness and conversion, we have invested quite a bit in terms of digital, Facebook and Google. Personally, I hate that because I don’t want to give the two largest companies in the world to have virtual monopolies on the advertising businesses of all of our money, but in order to be competitive, they do have the best advertising products out there. It’s certainly a part of our marketing mix.

We’ve also leaned a little heavier into audio and podcasts. Podcasting has increased in popularity a lot since the pandemic. We dove heavily into advertising host-read ads and working with some radio stations like NPR to do advertising as well. One of the final things I’ll say in terms of our major marketing mix is partnerships. We partnered with a lot of community organizations like yoga studios, nonprofits or even PTA fundraisers, where kids sell Hungry Harvest subscriptions and candy bars. For nonprofits, yoga studios, gyms and other organizations like that, they serve as affiliates for us. We give them money for referring us or advertising us through their customer base, donor base or newsletter. That has worked well for us as well. We have 4 or 5 primary sources of advertising. Our first source of advertising was investing in the best product possible that people got excited about and can tell their friends. That’s how I first started.

I want to thank you for making that a very detailed answer. Jumping into another question here, which is I’m based in New York City, I can’t yet order from you but I’ve tried both Misfits and Imperfect, both of which offer CPG products as add-ons. I suspect most are discontinued SKUs. Do you offer the same? If not, is this part of your future consideration?

We do CPG add-ons as well. It’s probably the same story that these SKUs otherwise would go to waste, discontinued, mislabeled, misprinted, missing ingredient, but it still tastes fine. We both have a private label section where we’re selling Hungry Harvest branded items, such as soups, some pickles and some other items coming up quickly. We sell other brand items as well. If anybody reading has a food brand and you’d like to talk about selling it through the Hungry Harvest platform, feel free to shoot me a note and we could chat.

I love this question that just came through here and that is, “If you go back to when you had your little stand outside of the student union, knowing what you know now, would you do this again?”

Yes, I’d do it much better. I may make fewer mistakes along the way. When you first asked me for an intro, it has been an absolute joy to do this business. I’ve had some ups, but lots and lots of downs. I probably would have avoided a few of those knowing what I know now. I’m young. I looked at my friends who I was extremely jealous of out of school who went and got cool jobs in Portland. I’m from Baltimore. I love Baltimore, but it’s not a cool city like Portland or Austin or one of these hip cities that everybody is moving to go out of college.

I was extremely jealous. I was living in my parents’ basement. I wasn’t making any money doing this thing that I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how it was going to work. I had a lot of emotion about being jealous of friends and saying, “Can I do something that’s better than this or that’s different than this?” I’m glad I stuck with this. I’m glad I told myself that this would eventually pay off. Most likely, I don’t want to brag. I just want to tell it from my perspective of how I walked through this. I’m most likely making more money than my friends who got jobs out of college and that’s not why I’m doing this. It was all self-paid. I feel proud of that fact. I’m not saying that to brag at all. It’s a point of pride for sure. It’s also a point of pride to know that I’ve created 100 jobs by sticking with this and creating a lot of impact.

To sum it up, I am very glad that I stuck with this. It’s been a very fulfilling journey despite all the failures that we’ve done. We’ve almost run out of money twice. I’ve gotten into huge fights with employees, where they’ve quit or almost quit or I’ve had to give them concessions on equity or on salary that I probably shouldn’t have. There have been a lot of points of failure that I wish I could have done again, but I don’t regret any of those decisions because it has led me here where we’ve been moderately successful now.

You should be proud of what you’ve done. It is not just the income, it’s everything. My guess is that those friends who you felt a little bit of envy towards are returning that envy as well to you now and seeing the fact that you’ve created something that’s good and meaningful in the world and created 100 jobs, but also this education. I do this for a living. I come alongside founders every day. Every night, I go home and say to my wife, “I am so lucky because this is so cool.” Every one of you is risking everything to do what you believe is right, needed and missing. It takes guts, courage, resilience, innovation, creativity. It takes a bit of stupidity at times. What’s the question you wish I asked that you would love to share? Any advice or anything that you’d like to get out there into the ether?

I want to put this out there. I’m assuming that there are a lot of food entrepreneurs, food and beverage and natural products. I think this is a very tight-knit community. As entrepreneurs, we are the only ones to help each other. If we don’t help each other, nobody else will. Even if you talk to your employees about your issues, they oftentimes can’t relate because they didn’t start the business. They don’t have the weight of the entire success or failure of the business being on your shoulders, which often is crushing at times.

I would encourage everybody to continue to support each other. I know we’re all competing in certain ways by selling competing products or doing whatever, but we need to stand up for each other and help each other when we need it. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me or to each other to continue to have learning experiences. One of my favorite things to do is to bitch to other entrepreneurs about my problems. They’re the only ones who can understand what I’m going through. It’s insanely helpful and therapeutic to a point to be able to do that to people who truly understand. Your investors, other employees, significant others and families don’t understand what you’re going through, but other entrepreneurs do. That’s my final word.

We have an online community for the brands. We have a section that we call Brags and Groans. There are two things. You want to be able to celebrate your wins with somebody who understands how hard-fought they are and how few and far between. You want to be able to bitch and get it off your chest. Not just bitch to bitch, but bitch to other people who are like, “I know that. I get that. I’ve been there. I’ve done that.” There’s a guy who’s been on the show. His name is Jono Bacon. He studies communities. One of the most important communities that you need to have as an entrepreneur and as a brand is your community of consumers, but right next to it is your community of collaborators. That’s what all of you represent. It’s the opportunity to collaborate and seek common ground. Evan, I want to thank you for joining. I appreciate you sharing your insights. I say this with all sincerity, I’m impressed.

Thank you.

Thank you all for joining. Make sure to reach out to Evan. If you’re within the geography that he serves, make sure you sign up and order. Thanks, everyone, for joining. We’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• Hungry Harvest

• Thanks for the Feedback

• Jono Bacon – previous episode

About Evan Lutz

Evan is a 27-year-old social entrepreneur from Baltimore, Maryland who is passionate about food justice, entrepreneurship, and the Baltimore Ravens. He’s a frequent guest on NPR, the Washington Post, and Baltimore News stations.

He’s been recognized in Forbes 30 under 30 in the social entrepreneurship category, Baltimore’s 40 under 40, and Montgomery County Emerging Business of the Year Award, previously won by Honest Tea, Sweet Green, and Comcast. He was also featured on ABC’s Shark Tank, where he made a deal with Robert Herjavec.

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