Oats and Kind Backs Brands with a Mission

Leslie Shages is the founder of Oats and Kind.

This interview has been edited.

Would you tell us a little bit about Oats and Kind?

Oats and Kind is a local shop for innovative, health foods with an impact! It was founded to address the 37 million cars worth of greenhouse gases emitted from food waste every year, while at the same time, shining a spotlight on phenomenal, mission-driven brands.

The store is exclusively online, and our aim is to make it a fun place to shop by offering handpicked, uber-healthy foods, new products weekly, and super-affordable prices that rival or beat prices for mainstream (often junk-filled) foods.

Every week we feature 75–100 fantastic foods that are perfect on the inside but risk going to waste for any number of reasons. These include things like cosmetic “imperfections” (an insignificant typo), a surplus, or short-er shelf life (this can mean 6–9 months remaining for many products). Almost every brand out there will have products that can’t be sold through traditional retail for a reason you and I would find absurd.

We then take our eco-friendly mission one step further by biking deliveries whenever we can. This not only means less carbon emissions, it also means no excess packaging! No bubble wrap or plastic bags…