How Misfits Market Went From Selling Ugly Produce To Becoming The Amazon Prime Of Perishable Food

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The 33-year-old grocery entrepreneur claims this system is one of only a few nationwide that can ship customized boxes of food to anyone’s doorstep with room-temperature, chilled, and frozen items all in the same order. This feat as well as Misfits’ burgeoning fulfillment business for other brands is why Ramesh dreams of becoming the Amazon of perishable food—or at least the Amazon Prime—though he knows he has a long way to go.

“Amazon has built infrastructure for e-commerce and there’s so many different ways of monetizing it,” says Ramesh. “That philosophy has always been in the back of my mind—if we can build the best perishable [food] infrastructure in the country, we can monetize it in a lot of different ways.”

So far, Ramesh, who was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs list in 2020, has grown Misfits into a business with $500 million in annual revenue, with $45 million of that from Fulfilled by Misfits. Roughly $50 million comes from selling the ugly produce that Ramesh founded the business on in 2018 and another $50 million is generated by Misfits’ in-house brand, Odds & Ends. But these days, the vast majority is from regular grocery sales.

Fulfillment has become the fastest-growing part of Misfits and its gross profit margins are the strongest, too. That’s helped pad Misfits’ overall gross margins, which ended 2025 at over 40%, compared to typically around 20% for conventional grocery chains. Misfits Market is making more gross margin than traditional grocery chains, as well as publicly traded marketplaces such as pet food website Chewy, which has 30% gross margins and is the most similar publicly traded business to Misfits because it’s an online marketplace that does home delivery for perishable and non-perishable items. Not only that, but Misfits’ customers are also still saving more money—between 10% and 50%—than if they shopped in their neighborhood supermarket.

Ramesh says few entrepreneurs are competing with him to fix the grocery industry, and, in that, he’s learned a surprising lesson: “Low-margin businesses are good to build businesses in,” he says. “The hard businesses are the ones no one goes after because no one can make it work. So there’s no innovation, and it’s easier to break in and turn it on its head. And if you’re able to figure it out, there’s a much bigger prize at the end.”  Ramesh’s ultimate goal, he says, is taking Misfits public, like Instacart and DoorDash.

Much like Amazon’s early years, Misfits is not yet profitable and he’s “fine trading short-term profitability for healthy growth.” But Ramesh is investing for the long-term (Misfits manages a fleet of 350 refrigerated and freezer trucks) and continuing to push the company to new places (it also works with third-parties to sell curated boxes for diabetes or cancer patients, utilizing preventative care money for produce and protein purchases, totaling $6 million in sales in 2025).

After leaving his hometown of Chennai, India at six months old, Ramesh and his software engineer parents moved to Bahrain. Two years later, the family lived in Dubai. They left again for St. Louis, Missouri and then finally Atlanta. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school and then went to work for Apollo Global Management. As an analyst, one of the companies he covered was in cold storage, and he learned that if a truck is late for a delivery, even if only a few hours behind schedule, the orders are often scrapped, and the perishable food is dumped.

After leaving Apollo to start a coding bootcamp business with two friends, Ramesh kept thinking about the inefficiencies of the food industry. To study the problem, he spent several months talking to farmers to understand just how pervasive and damaging food waste is.

In 2018, Ramesh started “just saying yes to some of them and buying the produce.” He stored boxes of discarded apples and other misshapen produce in his Philadelphia apartment and decided to sell a mystery box as a test case.

With produce sitting in his apartment, Ramesh coded Misfits’ website and he bought some Facebook ads offering ugly-but-still-good produce at a 30% or even 40% discount to grocery store prices. Within 10 days of the website going live, Ramesh had 500 pre-orders.

In 2019, investors including San Francisco-based Greenoaks Capital Partners poured in $16.5 million. By the time Ramesh landed a spot on the 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs list at the end of the year, Misfits had helped rescue more than 10 million pounds of food.

The business was still only a little over a year into operating when the pandemic hit, and orders flooded in—up 400%. It overwhelmed the business, so much so that Ramesh had to shut down Misfits’ waitlist between April and May 2020. He even stopped advertising on Facebook.

Ramesh says he sees a path to sales of $800 million in the next couple of years, and $1 billion annually beyond that. One way to get there, he says, will be keeping Misfits’ offerings affordable.

“I don’t think the grocery industry has seen real innovation, I’m not exaggerating, in a hundred years,” says Ramesh. “From the way you source and buy to the way you set up a fulfillment center and the way you deliver to the doorstep, all of that can be reimagined.”

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