2020 - The year of Ugly

2020, what a year! This year is coming to end an end (finally). I want to use this post to

give everyone a summary of our year at The Ugly Company. It has been a rollercoaster

of successes and failures.

We began the year with a significant accomplishment – Hello! I’m Ugly made its way

onto shelves in SoCal Whole Foods. MacKenzie did an exceptional job taking the reins

to ensure we were successful with our new business partner.

In March, both Jared and Liz began to work for Ugly full-time.

Jared manages everything from our marketing strategy, to our website. Jared took

Ugly’s website from being a relatively hideous thing, that I originally made, into the

beauty that it is today. He is the person behind all of our social media posts. Feel free

drop him a DM anytime!

Liz took charge of all of the behind the scenes work that makes Ugly a functioning

company. It has been really special to see the sizes of our orders grow. Liz went from

shipping a few cases, out here and there, to shipping out several pallets at a time.

In May, we originally had plans to open a new office in Kingsburg, but we decided to put

our expansion on hold. Everyone knows all about Covid and the struggles it has

created for people across the world… So, I’ll skip over everything Corona related since

are all weary of it by now.

In the summer and fall, with the contributions from our customers, we donated several

hundred bags of fruit to Valley Children’s Hospital in Fresno, and Kingsburg High

School. We wanted to do our part to support frontline workers, and it wouldn’t have

been possible to give as much as we did without everyone’s support!

I myself spent most of my time this summer working with local farmers, in Kingsburg, to

find a home for their ugly fruit. If you happened to pass our Ugly big rig on CA-99, then

I was likely the one in the driver’s seat, trucking our ugly fruit to get cut and dried. I

often found myself thinking about the years past, when I would haul fruit from those

same farms to my dad’s compost yard instead. As Ugly’s business grows, we keep

diverting more and more of that ugly, but perfectly edible, fruit from the compost yard to

the dehydrator. That leads me to our biggest accomplishment of 2020.

This year we prevented 142,866 pounds of fresh ugly fruit from becoming waste. None

of this would have been possible without the support of customers. There’s an

incredible amount of work that goes into diverting all of that ugly fruit from being tossed

out. I, on behalf everyone here at The Ugly Co., cannot thank you enough for believing

in our company and mission.

Thank you all, we cannot wait to see what 2021 has in store! Happy New Year!!!