Everything the Supermarket Rejected
A carrot that grew bent into a question mark is still a carrot. A yogurt past its best-before date by a week—kept refrigerated the whole time—is almost certainly fine to eat. A bag of lentils stamped with yesterday’s date will feed you exactly as well as one stamped with next month’s. You know all this intuitively, but somewhere between the farm and the shelf, someone decided that cosmetic conformity and calendar anxiety were worth generating millions of tonnes of edible food waste a year. In Germany alone, roughly twelve million tonnes gets thrown away annually. The number is obscene.
SirPlus is a Berlin social enterprise built on the observation that this doesn’t have to be normal. Founded in 2017 by Raphael Fellmer, Martin Schott, and Alexander Piutti, the company buys surplus, rejected, and near-expiry food from wholesalers, retailers, and regional farmers, then sells it at reduced prices. Raphael already had skin in the game—he’d helped start the food rescue movement that eventually merged with Foodsharing, a grassroots network redistributing food before it hits the bin.
The shop is in Berlin-Charlottenburg, on Wilmersdorfer Straße. Selling food past its best-before date is legal as long as it passes a freshness check and the label is honest about it. Most of what ends up in supermarket bins is perfectly edible—it just looks wrong, or the numbers on the package make people nervous. SirPlus is betting that enough people have noticed the absurdity of this to show up and buy a crooked carrot.
What I find most interesting about it isn’t the sustainability angle, though that matters. It’s the implicit argument that the grocery store’s aesthetic standards are arbitrary and expensive. A tomato that cracked in heavy rain still tastes like a tomato. The visual flaw is informational—here is a tomato that experienced weather—not a quality judgment. We’ve been trained to read it as a defect, and the supply chain has been engineered around that training. Quietly arguing back seems like the right scale for the problem.