PurePlus Upcycled Fruit&Veg Supply Chain

Amy Keller is the CEO and Co-Founder of PurePlus.  My family background is that my grandfather ran Spangler Candy Co., we make 2B DumDum lollipops per year.  Fast forward to my career in which I focused on the environment. I worked on LiveEarth with Kevin Wall and Al Gore during the COP21 where 193 world leaders signed the Paris climate change treaty.  I also am very focused on health as a 7x Ironman and ultramarathoner. As principal of advncmnt:projects, I worked with individuals and organizations, helping them use their resources for global social impact. I took an innovative approach to making social change, one that involves mapping new trends, collaborating with thought leaders, and devising creative solutions to complex problems. I determined a long time ago that whatever business I started, it had to make a contribution to the world and make a positive impact on people’s lives and health.   

PurePlus brings value in its ability to provide an alternative solution to repurposing imperfect produce into a second-tier product that can be utilized and given a longer shelf life. PurePlus has a plan to eliminate waste, by producing products made from valuable fruits and vegetable powders from our color lines. Fruits & vegetables are the most wasted product & have the highest climate impact. Food is the number one cause of poor health-people are overfed but undernourished, calorie rich but nutrient poor.  The way we eat and produce food is a significant contributor to climate change. 

The PurePlus products provide servings of fruits & vegetables in an affordable & accessible way.We bring value in providing an alternative solution to repurposing wasted produce to deliver nutrition to the consumer and to reduce climate impacts.

Food is the single strongest lever to optimize health and environmental sustainability on Earth.

The way we eat and produce food is a significant contributor to climate change. Food waste is a global problem with a direct economic cost of $1 Trillion per year. This food wastage also comes at a steep environmental and social price, totaling $1.6 trillion, ~50% of which is lost due to natural resource usage. Food waste is a market inefficiency, the kind which does not persist in other industries. Agriculture is estimated to contribute between 13-24% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Given this enormous footprint, wasting less food presents a key opportunity to address climate change.

I Come from Sugar. What does that mean? My family owns a candy factory, Spangler Candy Company. We sell 2B Dumdums every year. We know now that food is the number one cause of poor health - 90% of people don’t eat their daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

So Imagine a world where fruits and vegetables taste like candy. We help people get their fruits and vegetables on a daily basis through FAVES - a healthy candy. PurePlus created FAVES candy to provide stealth nutrition & helps farmers to upcycle whole fruits & vegetables from being unharvested.

We have a transparent supply chain and are patenting our process from seed to market.

The Global Market for candy is $80B, this market is ripe for alternatives to sugar and filler.

Food is the number one cause of poor health in America. 10% of the population has diabetes and 75% of men and 60% of women are obese or overweight and heart disease is the #1 cause of death.

Very few Americans eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables every day, putting them at risk for chronic diseases. As a result, we’re missing out on the essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber that fruits and vegetables provide. It’s no secret that most of us could probably stand to eat more fruits and vegetables. Eating more than 5 servings of fruits and veggies per day can reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer, and early death.

We believe food is your medicine. Our country is overfed but undernourished, calorie rich but nutrient poor. Nearly 870 million people in the world are undernourished and 9 out of 10 Americans don’t eat enough whole foods.

The goal is to capitalize on the momentum built at the UNGA, to use our work as an example to companies and government to announce a formal upcycled food campaign. 

We will help establish food-focused climate goals, accelerate action by leveraging the influencer network to develop local and global awareness around the power of food, and measure actual impact. We are partnered with the Environmental Media Association and ReFED as their Global Innovator of the Year in 2019.

The end goal is to create massive demand for fruits and vegetables that restores soil, climate, and health accelerating systems change.

I have had a career working on the environment and Health and Well-being as a 7 time Ironman in which health and nutrition is important part of the sport. These two worlds collided when I was in Svalbard, Norway visiting the Global Seed Bank to learn about food security. 

At the same time,I was reading Paul Hawken's book "Drawdown" and learned that roughly a third of the world’s food is never eaten, which means land and resources used and greenhouse gases emitted in producing it were unnecessary. Interventions can reduce loss and waste, as food moves from farm to fork, thereby reducing overall demand. 

While cross country skiing across the Arctic - I thought - What if we could create a company that would illuminate the power of food to restore the health of people and the planet?

The idea is that our definition of fruits and vegetables is everything that is not considered and the advantage is that PurePlus+ gets the raw material from local farmers as they go through the field to market process. When the balance is upset, more fruits and vegetables are turned away, and that’s where PurePlus+ comes into the picture. 

In the US, up to 40% of food is wasted –that’s 63M tons-every year-valued at $218B annually. At the same time, roughly 40% of all food grown worldwide does not reach a person’s mouth. Food is lost at every stage of the distribution chain, on farms, in grocery stores, restaurants, manufacturers, and in the home. The causes are many, from spoilage to transportation, to economic limitation, but the result is the needless waste at the same time as starvation. 

More than 60,000,000 tons of produce cross the U.S.-Mexico border ports at Nogales each year, bound for all parts of the US. From November to May, approximately 60% of all fresh produce in the United States comes from Mexico, with a value of approximately $2.5 billion per year, placing Nogales among the top 3 ports of entry for food eaten in the US, but grown elsewhere. 

While the produce industry has demonstrated remarkable efficiency (over 99%) getting produce to market in good condition, waste remains a significant concern; more than 8,000 tons of ugly produce end up in southern Arizona landfills annually. 

Increasingly, we expect our professional endeavors to line up with our values, interests, personal histories, and beliefs. I wanted to have a clear and deeply satisfying answer to the question, “Why did you spend all that time and effort producing that product or service or starting that company?

Whatever business I started, I determined I wanted it to make a positive impact on people’s lives and health and the health of the planet.

This business idea is consistent with my values and lifestyle, and it contributes to my personal goals and dreams. It directly and positively affects lives beyond mine and the world will be better off ifI succeeded. It have a positive environmental impact.

I wanted to create a business that had higher margins to work with, which would allow us to pay people well and generate critical cash flow to fuel growth. I knew we would start small, but it will be something that could grow continuously for years to come and potentially become a billion-dollar business. We are a category definer and are new to the world or at least different from what’s out there today. I realized that the really exciting businesses were innovative, differentiated, disruptive and to be successful we must be imbued with this sense of mission, personality, and personal values.

We have been raising a $1M seed round to expand our footprint in the industry focused solely on sales growth and generating revenue for the business through our upcycled, transparent supply chain.  

With a focus on finding investors who can actually add value, it took an endless number of pitches to show how I will scale and perfect our playbook to get funding. I developed relationships, earned trust, demonstrated goodwill, exuded passion and confidence, never accepted defeat, built our business with sound financials to show people our vision. The legwork of vetting the idea, building a team, and getting a handle on the details about our market and product, I knew funding is going to be just a portion of it and kept building the solution. 

It’s time to pull all the parts of the company together to go out and build a product and generate customers to learn more about the upcycled, rescued produce. Without an intense focus on execution, all we have are ideas and plans on paper. Execution is what turns them into a company. Execution is about getting the right things done consistently. 

As Global Head for LiveEarth, I was tasked with leading government, NGO and corporate partnerships.

The UN met in December 2015 in Paris for the COP-21 to sign the climate change treaty. Prior to, Live Earth aimed to get 1 Billion people to sign petitions to get their leaders on board with these efforts so that the UN would successfully adopt a new climate treaty for a sustainable future. I  launched a campaign partnering with governments, brands, NGOs, and artists throughout the world to raise awareness: with 6 large-scale concerts around the world at the same time and other organizations hosting their own climate change events.

In order for us to build a community, I had to identify how we could divide it into teams to break out the wider community into more manageable parts, ensure that we satisfy the main needs of capacity when forming the community, attract a diverse range of members to our community to get involved and contribute to our goals, build an environment conducive to our wider goals, define the scope of each team, and help team members understand the scope and finally to understand the extent and range of collaboration between these global teams.

PurePlus brings value in its ability to provide an alternative solution to repurposing this produce into a second-tier product that can be utilized and given a longer shelf life. PurePlus has a plan to eliminate waste, by producing products made from valuable fruits and vegetable powders. 

PurePlus is disrupting candy with stealth nutrition.  PurePlus is upending the candy market, like Halo Top did to ice cream.  PurePlus has created a healthy candy wafer from the most climate impactful, imperfect and nutrient dense fruits and vegetables.  Each piece of healthy candy provides stealth nutrition through fruits and vegetables.  We address the barriers to fruits and vegetable consumption by being affordable, accessible and integrating into the current lifestyle of our customers.

Our key differentiator is our access to distribution and sales and our influencer and advisor base sees us as a Triple Threat. 1. We Help People 2. We Save The Planet 3. We have High Margins which means profits.

We are facing an era where humanity will shed those brands whose products do not solve a need, fail to commit to fix a cause, and fall short to fuel movements to bring people together.

PurePlus+ will collaborate with all stakeholders from government, NGO, corporate to the global citizens to launch a global movement at the intersection of food, health and the planet.  Through working with MIT Solve and its partners, we can illuminate the power of food to restore our health and the climate.  We would like to set a set of food-focused climate restoration goals and give the public agency the opportunity to reverse global warming and micronutrient deficiencies by what we eat.

Year 2020 - 150,000

Year 2021 - 300,000

Year 5 - 3,000,000

Our triple-bottom line focuses on people & the planet. We measure success through the wellbeing of our producers, consumers & the resilience of the ecosystems that produce our core ingredients.   We set KPIs to measure ourselves around transparency of our supply chain, innovation of the drying systems and our impact on the environment.

Financial - closing the seed round

Supply Chain - further building out Mid-West supply chain as MVP and then working on AZ and CA market 

Manufacturing - finding manufacturers that are willing to replace sugar and filler for a scalable product through equipment

Financial - we are backed by PTK Capitl and they are assisting with secondary round of funding in Fall 2020

Supply Chain - working with Full Harvest and others in the agricultural sector to build upcycled supply chain

Manufacturing - utilizing my experience through family business, Spangler Candy Co., to work with the right manufacturers that will keep the nutrition molecules intact for the product

Environmental Media Association - we are the Global Innovator of the Year from 2019 and they are an outlet for PR for us with influencers in LA, CA

501CTHREE - is Jaden Smith's non-profit with a vision to achieve radical decarbonization by influencing a new generation to adopt more sustainable lifestyles and engage in social impact.  501CThree is the non-profit reimagined for a younger generation who wants action, blending innovation and creative storytelling to raise awareness and get people engaged with climate change solutions.

ReFED - we are a global innovator with a group of global entrepreneurs to collaborate with on projects

Upcycled Food Association - founding member and working with companies on innovative planning around food waste

This business idea is consistent with my values and lifestyle, and it contributes to my personal goals and dreams. It directly and positively affects lives beyond mine and the world will be better off ifI succeeded. It have a positive environmental impact.

I wanted to create a business that had higher margins to work with, which would allow us to pay people well and generate critical cash flow to fuel growth. I knew we would start small, but it will be something that could grow continuously for years to come and potentially become a billion-dollar business. We are a category definer and are new to the world or at least different from what’s out there today. I realized that the really exciting businesses were innovative, differentiated, disruptive and to be successful we must be imbued with this sense of mission, personality, and personal values.

We are focused on a Direct to Consumer market with our cause marketing campaign and the alternative markets in food deserts where that are at the intersection of climate justice and social justice.

How we lead to financial sustainability is through raising investment capital when ready to scale and selling products that are a proof of concept for others wanting to replace sugar and filler in foods with fruits and vegetables.

Currently in a $1M seed round that is fully committed and through a convertible note.

We are launching with a proof of concept in July 2020.

We are planning a secondary round in the Fall of 2020 with strategic partners of PTK Capital.

3 year financial forecast provided upon request

By being connect to MIT, we will be exposed to new insights, transformational experiences and unique opportunities to positively impact the world.

We also will have the opportunity to inspire others that are willing to take action and eager to learn and be inspired leverage their networks to make real change.  On top of that, will adopt the tools to inspire those in their respectable global communities to take action.

Since PurePlus has only started in one region of the world in the US, we see this as the proof of concept.  The MIT partnership will allow us to bring this project global through powerful partnerships, great storytelling and our combined worldwide network.

One of the first barriers for climate change innovation is in making the leap from lab research to experimentation in real-world applications. Driven by state and local mandates, MIT provides an ecosystem of agencies and private sector partners that are ready and willing to experiment with climate change solutions and tell the story globally.

A perfect partner is one that we may collaborate with in the agricultural industry that has a focus on upcycling their fruits and vegetables into a product for human consumption.  The types of companies would be Tropicana, Dole etc.