After harvesting a bounty of organic tomatoes, the workers at Sage Mountain Farm in Aguanga, Calif., gathered around a table to grade them into four categories: uno (one), dos (two), aguado (mushy), and compost. Only a handful of moldy tomatoes went into the compost. Everything else had a use.

Sage Mountain Farm is unique. They sell the number-one grade tomatoes to wholesalers or retailers like most farms do. They also sell the number-two grade tomatoes, since they are perfect quality with nothing wrong aside from slightly small size or odd shape. Even the mushy ones have a future as sundried tomatoes. But on many farms, these tomatoes would go to waste.

All told, an estimated 40 percent of food in the United States is wasted, according to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food and founder of WastedFood.com. “And that wasting happens at all steps of the food chain from farm to fork,” he adds. While we don’t know exactly how much is wasted at each step along the way, “we have pretty good estimates that farms and households represent the biggest amount of wasted food in American and hence also represent the biggest opportunities for change.”

Some of the waste is the lettuce you let wilt in your fridge, or the apples that fall on the ground at an orchard and cannot be sold due to food safety concerns. But then there are the mushy tomatoes, or even the entirely good but slightly small ones. Maybe nobody can save an apple that could be contaminated with E. coli, but surely somebody would want to eat a funny-shaped but otherwise perfect tomato, or cucumber, or carrot.

Enter a few young upstarts, Ben Simon, CEO and co-founder of Imperfect and Claire Cummings, the waste specialist at Bon Appetit Management Company Foundation. The two have not been out of college for long, but they are already making big waves.

Simon’s story began while he was still in college at University of Maryland, College Park. One night in the dining hall, he and his friends noticed workers throwing away food. “We talked to the dining hall worker and sure enough it was good food going to waste,” he recalls. “We set up a meeting with dining services and convinced them to let us donate it instead.”

He and his friends set up Food Recovery Network, an organization that donates food that would be wasted from university cafeterias to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, afterschool programs for kids, and other agencies fighting hunger. The organization grew quickly, from their school to a second chapter at Brown University to a total of 150 colleges and universities in just four years.

Simon became a part-time student in order to devote more time to the organization. “It felt super rewarding to be able to provide meals for people in the community who were having a hard time feeding themselves and who were going through challenges,” he reflects, “especially given the fact that this is really good food from the dining hall. Some of the stuff was really high-quality, artisan chef, really nice stuff.”

Food Recovery Network grew so much that Simon eventually began earning a salary, and he continued leading the organization for a year after graduating college. Then he decided it was time to move on because the non-profit he’d built could thrive on its own — and because there was more wasted food to save.