Profile: Rubies in the Rubble

London’s Piccadilly is a road that’s never not busy. The sidewalks are always crowded with locals and tourists alike, trying to take in all of the higher-end shops, department stores, hotels and restaurants. Fortnum & Mason is a sure place to find a large number of people shopping for the variety of specialty products it offers. It’s also where one might find Alicia Lawson serving up and chatting about chutney.

The Rubies in the Rubble team sells their chutneys in stores
across the U.K. as well as at local London markets.
Photo courtesy of Twitter. 

Lawson is the director of Rubies in the Rubble, a company that makes chutneys out of locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be wasted.

Along with giving people a free taste of the chutneys in Fortnum’s, she’s in charge of sales, operations and marketing. She also does a lot of explaining to people who are put off by the fact that “wasted food” is the main ingredient.

“I think a lot of people automatically jump to the idea of a bin or scrapings off a plate when you talk to them about food waste,” Lawson says. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with what we’re using; it’s just that it’s not right for the market that it’s being grown for, which is fresh retail, where people expect it to look a certain way.”

That means Rubies in the Rubble takes all the irregularly-shaped, oddly-coloured, too-ripe fruits and vegetables we wouldn’t even think of buying, and uses them to make long-lasting products like chutneys and other condiments.

The idea started when the company’s founder, Jenny Costa, read Tristram Stuart’s “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal,” one of the first books to cover the issue of food waste. Costa then went to a London food market, where she witnessed exactly how much perfectly good food was being thrown away.

She saw food waste as a problem she wanted to play a role in solving, but also saw as a business opportunity.

Jenny Costa (left) and Alicia Lawson (right) started off selling
their chutneys out of a minivan,
Photo courtesy of Twitter.

Lawson got on board in June 2012, when the company was operating a small kitchen in a mini-caravan in the parking lot in London’s Borough Market. Their products were also sold in some independent shops and delis. 

At that point, the two were making the chutneys themselves by tweaking traditional recipes created by Costa’s mom. And all the produce Lawson and Costa were using to make the condiments was coming from sellers at the market.

“Then we got interest from Waitrose (…) and we realized we needed to scale up,” Lawson said. “We also started talking to farmers directly (…) and realized there was so much more food that wasn’t even leaving the farm. So in order to really have impact on the problem, we were going to need to scale up.”

The pair sold their little kitchen and outsourced their production to a small manufacturer in Devon, U.K. Then, they got to work on growing their customer base and having their products on the shelves of more retailers. Since then, they also moved their chutneys into hotels, restaurants and cafes.

While they’ve seen success, whether it be their company size doubling (it’s now a team of four rather than two), or their idea getting tons of good press (including from CNN and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s website), Lawson says there is still a long way to go.

“For us, the impact is directly linked to the size that we are. So the more we sell, the more impact we have,” she says, adding that right now, the company only uses a small percentage of what farmers waste each year. “If we do get to the stage where there is no food waste because we’re using it all, then that’s going to be an amazing problem to have. We’ll have solved the issue.”

  

The first Rubies in the Rubble ketchup flavour is called Top Banana,
and it's now available online.
Photo courtesy of Twitter.

Lawson adds, the past few years the company has “chugged along quite happily.” There wasn’t much money being spent, which meant there was no debt, but there also wasn’t a lot of money coming in. This year, Costa, Lawson and their team have decided to change that. They managed to raise an investment of £120,000, all of which will be spent on growing the business.

One thing the cash has gone towards is a new product – Ketchup. Lawson says the recipes have nearly been finalized, and the plan is to have the condiment available online by January 2017, and on store shelves by March that same year.

“Eventually we want to be an umbrella brand that doesn’t just make one thing. Food waste is pandemic and it’s across the whole food industry, so we want our product to kind of reflect that,” Lawson says. “If it’s getting wasted, we’re going to make product out of it. It doesn’t matter what the product is, as long as it tastes great and is utilizing under-utilized produce.”

You can find more information about Rubies in the Rubble on the company’s official website. You can also get updates on the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.