Wendy Zhou, by her own admission, is not much of a gardener. She has, however, personally helped harvest 600kg of kūmara, 300kg of mushrooms and 400kg of cauliflower – and that’s just a random selection of what has been picked, collected and rescued from farms and organisations all over New Zealand – along with other volunteers from Perfectly Imperfect.
Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.
Zhou, a senior insights specialist with a bank, founded the organisation on March 25, 2020 – the first day of New Zealand’s national lockdown.
Her sister, Eileen, a tomato grower in Pukekohe, has a 2000sqm greenhouse and at that point in time, 600 plants and 200kg of freshly harvested toms.
“On that first day of lockdown, supermarkets opened but the food supply chain was already broken,” Zhou recalls. “Growers couldn’t send new crops downstream and the tomatoes couldn’t wait. My first instinct was to get the tomatoes to people. In three days, we sold everything through (e-commerce platform) Shopify and our WeChat group.” (WeChat is a Chinese instant messaging, social media and mobile payment app).
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That prompted Zhou to look into the issue of food waste and supply chain management, including the fact that New Zealand grows enough food to feed 40 million people – eight times our population – but much of it is exported or left in the fields.
To illustrate the point, she explains: “Last summer, we harvested cauliflowers in Pukekohe. The grower had called us after harvesting just 10% of the crop, asking if we wanted the rest. Our volunteers and I did the best we could, and got nearly 400kg of cauliflowers.”
Perfectly Imperfect gets these calls more often than you’d think, for a number of reasons. “Sometimes, there’s not enough workers to harvest the crop all at once. Many growers intentionally overproduce because they know a lot won’t look perfect, which is what the commercial market requires. The market wants veges that not only look appealing but also fit into a standard packaging size.”
Perfectly Imperfect redistributes gleaned crops to those in need and sells some in vege boxes (you can order yours from the Perfectly Imperfect website). The aim is not only to reduce on-farm food loss, but also to shift consumer mindset to accept fruit and veges that don’t look uniform.
Wendy Zhou is a finalist in NZ Gardener’s 2022 Ryman Healthcare Gardener of the Year competition. You can vote for her here.
Meet the other finalists:
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