When Apeel Sciences began receiving out-of-the-blue questions about the safety of its products in mid-2023, the company figured it was a misunderstanding that could be resolved with a few well-thought-out responses.

​Boy, were they wrong.

​The company had just completed a Canadian pilot in which its plant-based coating was used in place of plastic wrapping on English cucumbers when it suddenly started receiving a flood of questions about the product’s safety. Around the same time, the company’s retail partners began fielding angry questions about whether the coating was safe.

​“We get all this inbound about like safety, and we’re like, what’s going on?” Apeel cofounder Jenny Du told Eric Schulze on a recent episode of Food Truths.

​Initially, the company zeroed in on a series of Facebook posts as the source of the confusion. The posts linked to a safety data sheet for an industrial cleaning product from the UK that was also named Apeel.

​The U.S.-based Apeel thought it was weird but explainable. The posts presented the cleaning product’s hazard warnings as though they applied to Apeel Sciences’ edible coating. Simply put, and somewhat naively, the company thought it could correct the misunderstanding by explaining the facts.

​“We just think it’s like an honest misunderstanding,” Du said. “So we’re just explaining ourselves, putting our factual information out there, but it’s not really going away.”

​And the more the company explained, the more the misinformation appeared across social feeds. Before long, the narrative began to mutate.

​The new direction was fueled, perhaps not surprisingly in a post-COVID, conspiracy-filled world, by two grants the company had received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one in 2012 and another in 2015, totaling less than $1.1 million. The grants supported research into reducing post-harvest food loss in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to refrigeration and other infrastructure can be limited.

​The foundation did not receive ownership or control of the company, and Bill Gates had never been a shareholder, owner, advisor, or employee. That didn’t stop a number of seemingly random and disconnected social media accounts from framing the company as “Bill Gates’ Apeel.”

​Once Gates was inserted into the story, the claims became even stranger, with some posts suggesting the coating was a vehicle for putting vaccines or microchips into the food supply.

​The team at Apeel continued to respond with science-based explanations, assuming the misunderstanding would peak and eventually subside.

​It didn’t.

​Eventually, an outside advisor offered a different explanation.

​“It took a different kind of advisor to say, ‘Well, of course it’s not going away, it’s intentional,’” Du said. “And we’re like, ‘What?’”

​Once Apeel began looking at what was happening through that lens, it wasn’t long before the company saw signs of a targeted and organized attack. Du said disconnected accounts were posting similarly structured information around the same time, and the company saw a flood of website traffic from a country where it had no business presence but where bot farms were known to operate.

​“Unfortunately it’s months before we really get our heads around it,” she said. “Because at first you’re just dealing with the volume of consumer outreach and customer outreach. And so it’s just immediately reacting to that.”

​Fact-checks by legitimate news organizations like The New York Times helped establish that the claims were false, but they did not make the controversy disappear. According to Du, influencers also picked up the narrative and tried to use the controversy to drive subscriptions, product sales, and attention.

​By the time the company understood that it might be dealing with an intentional campaign, the damage had already spread beyond social media.

​Retailers and their food safety teams understood that Apeel used established food ingredients and that the controversy was about online misinformation and public perception rather than a new safety finding. But that didn’t stop some of them from asking to stop receiving Apeel-protected produce until the controversy died down.

​Looking back, Du believes Apeel should have taken a firmer position sooner.

​“One of the lessons learned would have been, you know, could we have just set a tone and stood up for our business and our science more firmly, at an earlier stage,” she said.

​When Schulze asked what the company had learned and how it might have responded differently, Du said companies need clear “decision-making swim lanes” before a crisis happens. Without them, internal debate can slow the response at precisely the moment when speed matters most.

​Another lesson, Du said, was not to spend too much time trying to identify the person or group behind an online campaign. Apeel focused on determining who had started the attack, but found that a coordinated campaign can be designed to leave few fingerprints, meaning the source may never be found.

​Instead, she said, companies need to be out in front, clearly communicating about their products with partners, customers, and end consumers.

​“You have to go and be out there talking about the company, the product, the science,” Du said. “Because otherwise, it’s like a vacuum. We weren’t speaking enough about ourselves and contributing or counterbalancing the narrative that was out there.”

​Rebuilding those relationships has required Apeel to go back to basics. The company has gone to great lengths to explain not only what its coating is made of, but also the broader, largely invisible world of waxes, fungicides, plastic packaging, and other post-harvest technologies already used throughout the produce industry.

​“We didn’t appreciate maybe what the baseline consumer understanding and awareness was or is around certain aspects of not just food but like fresh produce,” Du said.

​Part of Apeel’s strategy has also been to take legal action against online influencers. The Spoon became weirdly connected to this story last fall when, after I wrote about the company’s lawsuit against online influencer Robyn Openshaw, known as “Green Smoothie Girl,” I received a letter from Openshaw’s attorneys asking whether Apeel had compensated me for writing the article. It had not. The letter also said there was an investigation underway “of Apeel’s relationship with media outlets.”

​It was not the first threatening letter we’ve received from a lawyer at The Spoon, but it was certainly the weirdest. According to a press release on Apeel’s website, the company has resolved its lawsuit with Openshaw, who issued an apology for her comments about Apeel.

​All in all, Eric and Jenny Du’s conversation was a fascinating look at how online misinformation can impact a company and how difficult it can be to determine the right response in real time. There are certainly lessons to be learned from Apeel’s experience.

​You can listen to the full conversation by clicking play below or by listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.