Waste Knot's Jess Latchford on Why Most People Have Never Tasted a Real Apple

Jess Latchford has a theory about why so many people say they don't like fruit and vegetables: they've never actually tasted one. At a recent farm visit, she watched a group try heritage apples straight off the tree, after a lifetime of the shipped, stored, shelf-aged version. "This is what apples taste like," one of them said. "That's not an apple."

Jess is the founder of Waste Knot, a surplus-produce business marking its tenth year. Waste Knot works with regenerative growers to source fresh produce that would otherwise go to waste — misshapen vegetables, surplus from cancelled contracts, crops that don't meet retail's aesthetic standards — and routes it to restaurants, wholesalers, corporate caterers, schools and hotel groups across the UK and, as of recently, Ireland.

The business grew out of a career spent building relationships on both sides of the food supply chain. Jess worked logistics for small heritage-variety growers getting their produce into London's restaurant world, then started a fresh produce marketing company after maternity leave. A chance conversation at an industry event, with a corporate sustainability officer asking whether she had access to "wonky veg," landed just as the pre-farm-gate food waste story was breaking nationally — Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's exposé, a major WRAP report. "I truly believe whatever I do is based in relationships," she says. "It wouldn't have happened without knowing somebody who knew somebody."

Waste Knot's rule is that it only ever plugs into distribution routes that already exist, specifically so it never adds food miles. It's also one of FareShare's biggest distribution partners, getting the same surplus produce into food banks, kitchens, hostels and night shelters on a cost-neutral basis, funded by the corporate side of the business.

Supplying corporate kitchens with genuine surplus means working with unpredictable volumes, often as few as ten items a month, known roughly two weeks ahead. Rather than fight that constraint, Waste Knot built its messaging around it: produce goes out simply labelled soup, salad, side or smoothie, so a kitchen never has to commit to a fixed menu item that might not be available next week. The flexibility was a hard sell to corporate caterers used to strict multi-site standardisation at first, but Jess says it's been one of Waste Knot's more unexpectedly welcomed changes.

Alongside the supply side, Jess runs Waste Knot People, aimed at chefs and catering teams whose creativity she sees getting worn down by rigid corporate menu planning and allergen compliance. The programme takes chefs out to meet the growers in the field, rebuilding a relationship between agriculture and hospitality that Jess says got "decimated" once large buying platforms inserted themselves between farmer and kitchen. One farm visit, followed by glamping and a barbecue, produced the comment that stuck with her most: a colleague telling a teammate, "I didn't know you could laugh like that." Treating people as individuals rather than roles, she argues, is what actually builds a functioning team.

Jess also runs Leading Wild, a separate venture applying lessons from regenerative agriculture to leadership. Her argument is that a field's resilience depends on diversity, the same way a team does. "If you've got a high diversity of nutrients and microbes, that plant is going to adapt to metabolise what it needs versus a small diversity. It reflects into human nature. We need lots of diversity. We operate the best when there are different people around who we're learning from."

Keeping going against the sheer scale of the food waste problem — WRAP figures put food waste at roughly 10% of global emissions, with most countries barely addressing food loss — means deliberately not dwelling on the numbers. "You can absolutely get bogged down in the stats, and I think that's why I don't read them, actually," Jess says. "If you thought that way about everything, nothing would get done ever."

Her spoke was Planet, and her answer pushed back on a common assumption: that land can be used for either food production or nature, not both. Jess also consults on agroecological land projects, where landowners grow trees, shrubs and crops together in ways that build soil health while still producing food — often niche, low-volume crops like walnuts and cobnuts that suit Waste Knot's flexible routes to market precisely because there isn't much of any one thing. "There's very much a misconception that we can use the land for food or nature, and actually you can do both."

Waste Knot is B2B only for now, though a pilot called Waste Knot at Home is in the works, using existing delivery sites as pickup points rather than adding carbon-heavy doorstep drops. Find out more at wasteknot.org.uk or email jess@wasteknot.org.uk