Wonky Box: Delivering Fruit and Veggie Boxes That Help the Planet with EasyRoutes

It's not just about customers being picky about how their food looks. Consider that wonky cucumbers can't fit through plastic-wrapping machines, or that wonky eggplants can't be mass packed. All those perfectly good, fresh and delicious fruits and veggies end up rotting away in landfills, releasing greenhouse gases.

Enter Wonky Box, a food-rescue enterprise that is not only saving wonky fruits and vegetables from becoming waste, but is also helping growers, consumers and the planet at the same time.

Local farmers in New Zealand supply Wonky with their imperfect or surplus fruits and veggies and the Wonky team then works to box up and deliver the fresh produce to customers all over Wellington and the Hutt Valley.

Environmental sustainability is important to Wonky Box and they pay attention to the details. Even the boxes that they deliver are recyclable, right down to the paper tape. They try to use as little plastic as possible, and influence their growers to do the same.

Another detail they paid attention to is that over the past decade traffic emissions in Wellington increased by 14%, and in New Zealand as a whole by a whopping 50%. Wonky wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem, so they plan their delivery routes to be as efficient as possible using EasyRoutes for Shopify.

EasyRoutes is a delivery management app that helps manage deliveries, from route optimization, to picking and packing, to dispatch and customer tracking. “EasyRoutes has been a huge help to us whilst we've been setting up our business. The app integrates really well with our Shopify website and makes generating routes effortless,” says Katie Jackson, co-founder of Wonky Box. “EasyRoutes is straightforward to use and has multiple features to suit a variety of different business models. To top it off, whenever we've had any queries we've had super speedy answers from their support team.”

Wonky regularly delivers to more than 400 homes. To plan routes manually would take hours, but with EasyRoutes it's simply a matter of selecting the orders you want to deliver and pressing a button. Optimized routes means faster deliveries and less petrol used. “We are hoping that our one van delivering fresh produce will take more cars off the road that are headed to the supermarket.”