The founder came up with the idea when she visited New Covent Garden Market and saw huge quantities of perfectly edible, but unsold produce thrown away. She returned home with basketfuls of fruit and veg and made it into chutneys and jams, eventually setting up a stall in Borough Market to sell her produce. Every Rubies product makes use of otherwise discarded ingredients: aesthetically rejected fruit and vegetables, or under-utilised by-products of food production.
To date the company has saved 231 tonnes of fruit and veg from being disposed of. For every 100kg of product that Rubies sells it saves c. 9,500 tomatoes, 2,200 onions, 460 bananas, 1,100 apples, 860 pears and 701 cucumbers from going to waste – enough to offset 1.2m car miles.