Oddbox Turns 10

A decade of making a difference together.

It all started on a sunny Portuguese holiday where founders Emilie and Deepak tried a tomato, bought from a local market. It looked pretty “odd” compared to supermarket shelves, but when they tasted it, the flavour and freshness knocked their socks off.

That one singular tomato really made our founders stop and think: why is the fruit and veg we find in supermarkets so perfectly shaped? If growing fruit and veg is such a natural, intuitive process, why does everything come out the same shape, shade and size? What happens to those wonky courgettes, speckled apples and misshapen spuds?

Door-to-door deliveries

So, Emilie and Deepak got to work with a mission to rescue perfectly delicious produce from going to waste. Working from the concept that if the produce was really tasty, who would care if it had imperfections? 

Working directly with growers and suppliers, they delivered their first boxes right from the boot of their car, driving around Balham at the weekend to supply their first 20 customers. Thankfully, the congestion zone never reached Southwest London.

The London expansion soon followed, ticking off postcodes as the team ploughed on with their mission. Now, we cover 70% of the UK, all the way from Brighton to Burnley and beyond.

We’ve always embraced the misfits

Having started life under the name Tasty Misfits (we know), we soon blossomed into the Oddbox you know and love today. Well, almost. For a long time, fruit and veg boxes were our sole offering. Scooping up wonky and surplus produce, fighting food waste, all while scaling the business and expanding our delivery areas.

Then came Pick Your Own, where customers could swap their favourites in and out of their boxes. We wanted every last celeriac and courgette used up, nothing left languishing in a box and never wasting taste.

Next, in 2025, The Market was born, giving our customers a place to buy their loose refillables, jars and tins. From pasta á la no plastic to rescued tins of beans, The Market saved 260kg of plastic in its first year alone.

A fair price for our farmers

Supporting British growers has always been a priority for us, ensuring that they are paid a fair price for their hard work. Our sourcing team spend a lot of time every year driving across the country to visit them, checking in and making sure everything is as it should be. As well as making sure that everything destined for your box is in tip-top condition. Over the last 10 years, we’ve worked with 110 growers, with plenty more to come as we always look to find the best quality and variety.

Good food doing good

A phrase you may have also heard us say before is ‘good food doing good’. We’ve worked with City Harvest for years now, a charity that rescues surplus food and sends it out to over 130,000 people a week for free. In 2025, Oddbox donated a massive 146 tonnes of food to City Harvest. Now that really is good food doing good. 

Beyond that, we also want to do good in your kitchen. Bringing back the joy of cooking. Less following a recipe to the letter, and more using what we already have around and turning it into what we really want to eat. You should try it, it’s a good way to live (and eat).

A word from our founder

So much has changed over the years, but as our co-founder and CEO, Emilie, reminds us, our community stays at the heart of what we do.

“There has always been a wonderful sense of serendipity to Oddbox. We never set out with a grand plan to build a nationwide community. In the early days, we packed boxes in the church hall on our road in Balham, giving them fruit and veg in exchange, we donated produce to the local community fridge and met people who offered to help simply because they believed in what we were doing. Ten years later, Oddbox has grown beyond anything we imagined, but that generous, resourceful community spirit is still at its heart.”

Roll on the next ten years

Our tenth birthday celebrations aren’t done yet — the party’s only just begun, and so has the journey. We have so much more to come! For now though, we want to say a massive thank you to everyone in the Oddbox community. We genuinely couldn't do it without you.