Emilie Vanpoperinghe is from the North of France and graduated from ESSEC in 2004. She moved to the UK in 2010, worked in finance and the charity sector before co-founding Oddbox in 2016 with her husband Deepak Ravindran. She’s also the CEO.

Oddbox is a subscription service based in the UK that delivers fruit and vegetable boxes filled with “wonky” or surplus produce straight to customers’ doorsteps. These are fruits and vegetables that may have been deemed unsuitable by supermarkets due to their appearance or are surplus to requirements, but are still perfectly fit for consumption. Oddbox aims to tackle food waste by rescuing these items and providing them to customers directly to their doorstep. 

As a customer you get to pick the box size you need, unselect the food you do not want and Oddbox will bring you fruits and veg, direct from the producers. Priority is given to local farms.

The Oddbox idea came to Emilie as she was holidaying in Portugal; in the markets, fruits were delicious although they did not look right. She decided the UK market needed something different to the “look and all-year-round availability over taste” approach taken by most supermarkets. “In Nature, everything is not always the same” observes Emilie. With Oddbox she invites us to value diversity and taste as well. Because of their close relationship with producers, Oddbox tend to offer more seasonal and tastier produce.  As part of their mission, Oddbox aims to save 90,000 tonnes of fresh food a year.

Since they started in 2016 serving South London, they have strengthened the business, surviving fierce competition from the online grocery market, become certified as a BCorp and expanded to serve 70% of the UK’s territory (where the population density is high enough).

The service is rated 4.5 out of 5 by over 17,000 users on TrustPilot.

Oddbox is promoted mainly via digital marketing, leafleting, influencers and TV advertising. Business development has also been facilitated by marketing collaborations with Direct-to-Consumer companies who have similar values of sustainability and a customer base as forward-thinking as theirs.

Self-financed for the first few years, Oddbox has since needed external capital to scale and has raised £26 million over recent years, including close to £1.5 million from supporters on Seedrs, a crowdfunding platform.

Setting up a business in the UK is very easy, there are very few hurdles and registering a company at Companies House can be done in 5 minutes. What is more difficult is in terms of funding “I had no network here”, noted Emilie. “For alumni of English universities, it is much easier to raise funds with angels or other alumni who put money into their projects”. 

The challenge for us foreigners is to create a network and this “Le Pari” initiative is a great way to compensate for the fact that foreingers in UK are less likely to have a network like those who studied here. “Le Pari” is a great initiative to strengthen our ties between ourselves, locals, and other foreigners.

In 2018, facing her first round of external funding, Emilie wishes she had at least leveraged the ESSEC Alumni UK network but it did not cross her mind at the time. Instead, she had to rely on help from a startup incubator and ex-colleagues.