It’s Tuesday, and today we’re discussing Farm to Feed, a Kenyan agritech startup. Founded by Claire van Enk, Anouk Boertien, and Zara Benosa, the company’s most recent funding round was a $1.5 million seed round led by Delta40 Venture Studio, with DRK Foundation, Catalyst Fund, Holocene, Marula Square, 54Co, Levare Ventures, Mercy Corps Ventures, and DEG DeveloPPP Ventures also participating.

It’s not the first time I’ve written about Africa’s agritech scene, and it’s definitely not the last. I previously covered Winich Farms in Nigeria, MazaoHub in Tanzania, and Complete Farmer in Ghana. Now it’s Kenya’s time.

All of the companies mentioned above are, in one way or another, solving for harvest losses. Farm to Feed focuses on this problem specifically. So let’s look at why the issue exists and what are the consequences.

And I want to start with the consequences.

Let’s begin with the most damaging headline numbers:

I won’t say that harvest loss is the core reason behind these problems.

However, 30-40% of harvest in Kenya is lost or wasted. Crop losses are estimated at between $500 million and $600 million per year. My rough calculations suggest that if this food weren’t lost, it would be enough to feed around 1 million Kenyans. That’s only 5.5% of the undernourished population, which sounds small, but in absolute terms it’s still a massive number of people.

Farmers bear an even higher cost. First, losing 30-40% of harvest directly translates into losing 30-40% of income. Given that 65.4% of rural income goes toward food, this almost certainly means farmers eat less themselves. Second, they lose the income that would allow them to reinvest and expand production, meaning they can’t grow more food. Third, because production can’t expand, and for additional reasons such as soil degradation, which I covered in the Living Roots article, the share of undernourished people keeps increasing.

On that last point, we often hear about global poverty reduction. But when agricultural capacity doesn’t keep up with population growth, undernourishment becomes harder to deal with. In Kenya, the share of undernourished people has increased by 22%, and I don’t see how that trend changes without structural shifts in how food is produced, stored, and sold.

Next are food prices. Take maize as an example. 85% of the population consumes it, and it’s a dietary staple. A couple of years ago, maize prices rose by 35% year over year, while overall inflation stayed below 10%.

What all of that means is:

💭 There’s less food for more people, which makes the food more expensive, which means less people can afford it.

I could go further, but you probably got the idea.

So let’s move to other consequences.

Food loss accounts for about 21% of greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating it would reduce emissions by roughly 7 million metric tons. Against total national emissions of 94.5 million, that’s close to an 8% reduction.

Beyond emissions, food loss also accelerates soil and water degradation. 21.6% of land shows declining productivity. Fertilizer use has increased almost fivefold since the 1970s, yet yields have improved by only 22% and have largely stagnated for three decades. Only 56% of Kenya’s water bodies meet government quality standards.

There’s also wasted labor and energy. I find it deeply depressing to think that 30-40% of your work produces no outcome. Put differently, imagine knowing in advance that 2-3 hours of every 8-hour workday will be wasted.

Taken together, food loss results in:

To drive home the point, food loss contributes to:

There are a bunch of reasons contributing to losses, but we can divided those into five groups:

Now, those contributing factors result in two type of losses.

The first is true loss, where food is unsafe to consume or physically destroyed. Serious issue, but it’s not where I want to focus today.

The second type is more insidious because it’s avoidable. This is cosmetic loss. You know when you go to the store, see a carrot that looks a bit funny, and decide not to buy it? We all do that. And then it goes to waste. Sure, it’s not great when that happens in Switzerland—but there aren’t many people there who genuinely struggle to eat. In Kenya, or in much of sub-Saharan Africa, it’s a completely different story. There, that kind of waste is devastating.

We don’t have precise data on how much loss is cosmetic, but small-sample studies give a sense of scale. One study on export-bound produce found that:

A study conducted by Farm to Feed notes that among farmers dealing with imperfect produce, 46% used it as animal feed, 25% composted it, and 15% simply threw it away.

For farmers to deal with this problem, someone has to absorb imperfect harvest and create a market for it. And that’s exactly what Farm to Feed does.

Farm to Feed started as a marketplace for imperfect produce. The company works with smallholder farmers, buying produce that’s at risk of being lost or wasted, and sells it to smaller B2B buyers such as restaurants, schools, and caterers. As a result, farmers earn income from harvest that would otherwise be thrown away.

That’s the basic idea. Now let’s look at what the actual product looks like, and then how it evolved over time.

At the core of the offering are two products: a farmer-facing app and a buyer-facing e-commerce platform.

The app allows farmers to join Farm to Feed, understand what types of produce the company accepts, and sell their harvest. Through the app, farmers can schedule planting and harvesting activities, offer their produce for sale, and set their own prices, which gives them more flexibility than working with brokers. The company already sells 130 SKUs, which also means farmers can expand into new produce categories, including higher-margin ones.

Once a farmer and Farm to Feed agree on a deal, the harvest is either collected by Farm to Feed or delivered by the farmer to one of the company’s warehouse facilities. If needed, Farm to Feed carries out basic processing and prepares the produce for sale.

The e-commerce platform allows buyers to order produce and receive fast, predictable delivery. Because a large share of customers are restaurants and hotels, which need supplies early in the day, Farm to Feed operates 24 hours a day. Most products leave the warehouse around 5 a.m., all deliveries are completed by noon, and the team then prepares produce for the next day. Through the platform, customers can manage and track orders and see their impact, such as avoided CO₂ emissions.

I would the core thing that Farm to Feed solves for is messiness.

Farmers often deal with multiple brokers, each with inconsistent pricing and grading standards. As a result, farmers can’t reliably predict how much of their harvest will be sold or at what price. Payment terms also vary by broker. Farm to Feed replaces that uncertainty with consistent pricing logic and predictable payments.

Buyers also deal with multiple brokers, each offering different produce at different price points. This variety creates additional operational challenges, such as managing payments and receiving deliveries at different times.

Farm to Feed evolved from selling exclusively rescue grade produce, i.e. visually imperfect, into two additional categories.

First, it added Grade 1 and Grade 2 produce, which are high-quality fruits and vegetables. There’s a broader lesson here, which I’ll come back to in the takeaway, but what’s important is that it allowed Farm to Feed to fulfill a larger volume of orders.

Second, the company is now moving into semi-processed produce. Through this offering, Farm to Feed aims to:

Today, the company sells six semi-processed products.

I think the best way to understand how the business functions is through three core points.

1. Not a marketplace. Many publications I looked at describe Farm to Feed as a marketplace, which I disagree with. It’s not a marketplace in the traditional sense. While it aggregates supply and demand, the demand side doesn’t actually know who the end supplier is, because the seller is always a single entity: Farm to Feed. Similarly, on the supply side, farmers don’t really care about how many buyers exist downstream, since the buyer is also that same single entity.

This makes it easier to get the business off the ground, because supply and demand growth don’t depend on simultaneously scaling the other side. The downside is that the business can’t reach escape velocity in the way traditional aggregators can, and there are real COGS involved, since Farm to Feed actually purchases the produce.

2. It has limited scale. Because funding has been limited, which is unfortunately common in the region, Farm to Feed relies on partners to execute several parts of the value chain. To collect harvest from farmers, it uses aggregators (the other kind). To produce semi-processed food items, it works with manufacturing partners.

The core of the business is therefore much more software- and human-led:

3. Farmer friendliness. Farmers extract value from working with Farm to Feed in two main ways. First, the company takes their entire harvest. Second, it pays them within 72 hours, whereas farmers traditionally may wait weeks to get paid. This creates loyalty and ensures a stable supply of produce.

Over time, this also means more farmers are onboarded, which increases Farm to Feed’s ability to serve more clients and expand the number of SKUs it can offer.

This part is straightforward. Farm to Feed buys produce from farmers and sells it to B2B customers, earning a margin on the price difference.

Since launch, the company has onboarded 6,500 farmers and sourced over 2,000 tons of produce. In 2025, it grew sold tonnage by roughly 150%, and it’s projected that semi-processed foods could unlock a 2-5x revenue increase per kilogram.

Dealing with fresh produce is inherently risky. There’s spoilage risk, bad harvests, transportation challenges, and operational complexity throughout the chain. On top of that, I don’t expect margins in fresh produce to be particularly high, which makes it harder to absorb those risks when something goes wrong. This isn’t a high-risk, high-reward business. It’s closer to a high-risk, some-reward business.

Then there’s the question of defensibility. This is still a white space, so for now there aren’t many modern competitors, even though there are plenty of traditional ones. But until the company reaches meaningful scale, I don’t yet see what would prevent another operator from entering the market and doing essentially the same thing Farm to Feed does.

The optimistic view is that the business does reach scale. And once it does, it can start benefiting from forecasting, cold handling, packaging, and operational learning across the value chain. As inefficiencies are reduced, margins improve in two ways: less money and time are lost at each step, and less produce is wasted, meaning a higher share of the harvest is actually monetized.

At scale, Farm to Feed can also become the default option for both farmers and buyers. The company currently serves the Nairobi market, which I like. The company currently serves the Nairobi market, which I like because it can corner that market, and then expand into other cities, and someday — countries.

Finally, Farm to Feed works closely with customers and tries to deeply understand their needs. This creates a small but meaningful flywheel: the more the company talks to customers, the better it understands their requirements; the better it understands them, the more semi-processed products it can develop; and the more of those it sells, the more revenue and margin it generates, reinforcing the entire business.

This section has felt wasteful for a while, but I now think of it differently: what’s the one lesson investors and founders can take away from this company? In this case, from Farm to Feed.

The lesson is that sometimes an idea and positioning sound logical and attractive, and the product feels niche and differentiated, but the business actually shouldn’t stay niche.

Farm to Feed started with imperfect produce, which is very ESG-aligned, focused, and has a clear value proposition. What’s not to like?

Well, for farmers, that still means they have to find a place to unload the remaining 70-90% of their harvest, and Farm to Feed becomes just another broker they have to deal with. The same goes for customers: because only imperfect produce is offered, they may not always be able to fulfill their orders.

I’m big on differentiation, but sometimes it gets in the way of fulfilling customer needs.