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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Apeel

Sigh. It Looks Like Misinformation is Coming For Food Waste Technology Too

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how misinformation has real potential to harm the nascent cultivated meat industry. As it turns out, meat grown in bioreactors is not the only food tech-related misinformation floating around nowadays.

Over the last couple of weeks, viral media posts have circulated about the fresh produce life extension coating made by Apeel. These tweets and posts often reference Bill Gates’ investment in the company and present a mix of conspiracy theories ranging from claims that the Apeel coating will make users sick, cause skin or eye damage, or increase the population’s reliance on the pharmaceutical industry.

Some of the early posts pointed to a fact sheet which, according to a fact check by the USA Today, was about an industrial cleaner – also called Apeel – instead of the food coating. But even after it became clear that the warnings in the fact sheet were about a product meant for cleaning floors and not for the Apeel food coating, it didn’t seem to deter some on social media from suggesting the ingredients in the Apeel product were harmful or a part of some weird food control plot by Bill Gates.

The primary active ingredient in the Apeel coating mentioned in the posts is mono- and diglycerides. While there is a legitimate conversation to be had about whether excess mono- and diglycerides in our diets can be harmful, the posts suggest that Apeel’s coating is a danger to all those who consume it, despite the fact the company received a ‘no questions’ GRAS notification from the FDA that the additives are safe for their intended use. The posts also largely ignore that mono- and diglycerides are commonly added to various foods, such as bread, peanut butter, and ice cream, and for products with peels like avocados or bananas, the Apeel coating won’t actually be consumed (unless someone chooses to eat the peels for some reason).

Although this recent surge in misinformation does not seem to have the same potential impact as those surrounding cultivated meat, there is no doubt that it has been a concerning development for Apeel. Food misinformation is widespread today, sometimes due to deliberate efforts by organizations with vested interests in a product, and other times simply because self-proclaimed health or food experts raise the alarm based on something they have seen or read.

Bottom line: as new technologies for food become more commonplace, so will bad information about them. The companies behind these products need to work to educate customers and proactively address the flare-ups in the wild before they start burning out of control.

Doing Avocado-Eaters a Solid the World Over, Apeel Introduces Avocado Freshness Scanning System

Today Apeel announced they would unveil new freshness detection technology for avocados this week at the Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show.

The system, based on hyperspectral imaging technology, starts by shining a light that penetrates several millimeters below the skin. From there, it utilizes a sensor to measure how much light is reflected in the visible and near-infrared spectrum. Once scanned, the system’s AI predicts the avocado’s freshness and estimates shelf life by utilizing a “global avocado ripeness model” the company developed using machine learning based on “data on tens of thousands of avocados throughout multiple seasons, blooms, and countries of origin.”

The system, which is the evolution of the technology inherited by Apeel when it acquired Impact Vision last year, will be used in both a commercial implementation targeted at grocery retailers and distributors as well as in a scanner useable consumers to check freshness in the produce aisle.

The commercial-grade technology will feature a scanner and an “AI data model for imaging hardware in produce sorters” at packing houses and distribution centers. According to the announcement, the new scanner will detect freshness five times more quickly than traditional methods such as penetrometers (which poke holes in the produce to detect freshness). In addition, the new software will enable more accurate sorting, enabling distributors to target the proper retail channels based on the remaining shelf life.

While all that sounds great and represents a potentially significant advancement that could significantly reduce food waste, I can’t help but be a little more excited for the consumer retail scanner. If you’re like me, no fruit (yes, it’s a fruit) is more frustrating than the avocado; deliciously sublime when perfectly ripe, but hard as a rock if eaten too early and resembling the decaying flesh of a zombie if you’re just a couple of days too late. If this technology works, my days of throwing avocados into the compost bin may soon be coming to an end.

For Apeel, the new product line represents the first significant new product outside of the food tech unicorn’s flagship life-extension technology. According to the company, the technology will initially be limited to avocadoes, but they indicated they are working on extending it to other produce such as limes, mangos, and mandarins.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Apeel’s Quarter Bil, Bug Farm Beta Hatch Snatches $10M

The waning days of August usually mean a slowdown in news, but not so in the red hot food tech space. This week’s food tech funding news includes (yet another) quarter-billion round for food waste unicorn Apeel, a bug farm’s fresh $10 million, and the continued steady drumbeat of funding going into ghost kitchens.

Apeel’s Appeal

Food waste reduction continues to garner investor interest and food-life extension startup Apeel is leading the pack. The company, which announced this week it had raised a $250 million Series E, plans to use its new funds to ramp up operations for 10 new supply networks over the next year to add to its already impressive 30 food suppliers and 40 retailers in 8 countries.

The new funding round comes just a year after its celebrity-infused (Oprah, Katie Perry) Series D – also for $250 million – and brings the company’s total funding to $635 million at a $2 billion valuation. That makes Apeel the most highly valued startup in food waste prevention, above Imperfect Foods (valued at $700 million in January of this year).

Apeel’s, um, appeal is that life-extension technology is perhaps one of the most effective tools to fight food waste at grocery stores, which throw away about one-third of produce in any given year. Apeel isn’t the only player in the space as Hazel and Ryp Labs (the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase winner) also have life-extension tech, but Apeel is the one with far and away the most market traction.

I’ll be watching to see if Apeel uses its funding and strong market position to continue to expand its product portfolio beyond its core life-extension coating technology. This year’s acquisition of hyperspectral imaging company ImpactVision was a move in that direction, and I can see the company making more adjacent moves under the broader food waste prevention umbrella.

Ghost Kitchens/Virtual Restaurants

C3, $10 Million: C3, a virtual restaurant startup that operates 40 different concepts as part of its virtual food hall concept, has secured a $10 million strategic investment from private equity firm TriArtisan Capital Advisors. The investment, announced this week, is part of a larger $80 million series B funding round announced last month.

BigSpoon Foods, $2 Million: BigSpoon Foods, a ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant operator based in India, has raised a $2 million pre-Series A round from Dubai-based NB Ventures. BigSpoon runs its own kitchens in a number of mid-sized (what it calls tier 2) cities and also has a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands. It offers a “digital franchise” model that turnkeys a new franchise with a ghost kitchen facility and an arsenal of delivery-only restaurant brands for approximately $20 thousand per location.

Bug Farms

Beta Hatch, $10 Million: Cashmere Washington-based mealworm farm raised a $10 million funding round which it plans to use to expand production at its flagship production facility east of Seattle. Beta Hatch’s 42 thousand square foot facility produces mealworms for use in feed for livestock and pets and plans to use its cash infusion to increase production by 10x over the next year.

Alt Protein

Melt&Marble, €750,000: Melt&Marble, formerly known as Biopetrolia, announced this week it had raised a €750,000 (~$876,000 USD) seed round to further develop its fermentation-based fats for plant-based foods. M&M and others like Motif are building out the toolbox for plant-based meat brands to make their products more meat-like.

Shandi, $700,000: Singapore-based Shandi, a maker of plant-based chicken analogs (including shreds, pieces, strips, and drumsticks), has raised a $700 thousand seed round. This round, its second seed round, was led by the large Singaporean food conglomerate Tolaram Group.

Delivery & Marketplaces

Trifecta, $20 Million: Organic meal kit startup Trifecta has raised a $20 million Series B. While many first-gen meal kit startups fizzled, some of the entrants’ focus on health and sustainability seems to be gaining traction. Trifecta, Thistle, and Freshrealm have all raised funding rounds this year, which means the category has moved beyond the cold-shoulder many of them got after the disappointing Blue Apron IPO and closures of companies like Chef’d and Plated. As for what it plans to do with the money, Trifecta will expand its meal offerings and hopes to (perhaps ill-advisedly)become ‘Peleton of Nutrition’ with an expanded set of digital offerings.

Do you have funding news? Drop us a line and let us know.

Apeel Raises $250 Million to Accelerate Its Fight Against Food Waste

Apeel, best known for its shelf-life-extension technology for produce, has raised a $250 million Series E round of funding led by Temasek.

Additional participants include Mirae Asset Global Investments, GIC, Viking Global Investors, Disruptive, Andreessen Horowitz, Tenere Capital, Sweetwater Private Equity, Tao Capital Partners, K3 Ventures, David Barber of Almanac Insights, Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, and Katy Perry. The round brings Apeel’s total funding to date to over $635 million, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The company’s food-safe powder coating was developed to cover pieces of produce, such as avocados, and act as a barrier against water and oxygen, which are major contributors to rot. Apeel will use the new funding in part to expand the availability of its coating product to additional parts of the U.S., U.K., and Europe. The company currently works with 40 retailers and 30 suppliers throughout eight different countries.

Earlier this year, Apeel acquired hyperspectral imaging company ImpactVision to add another layer of information about plant ripeness to its process. The advanced imaging technology can essentially look inside each piece of fruit and gather information about maturity, freshness, and phytonutrient content. With this information, suppliers and distributors can decide where each piece of produce can then go. For example, a more mature piece can go to a retailer closer by, so it can reach the store shelf sooner.

Apeel said today it will also use the new funds to advance such data and imaging capabilities and integrate those capabilities deeper into its system. The company suggested there could be more acquisitions in this area in the future. 

In the U.S. alone, 35 percent of all food produced goes to waste, equalling about $408 billion annually and 4 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gases. At the same time, more than 40 million Americans are considered food insecure. Recent data from Project Drawdown found reducing food waste to be first of 76 solutions meant to reverse climate change, ahead of plant-based diets and utility-scale solar projects. 

Apeel’s edible coating is one method of fighting food waste. Others include Hazel Technology’s sachet that extends produce shelf life and Ryp Labs (née StixFresh), which makes a sticker that does much the same thing.

“Suppliers have a clock that’s ticking,” Apeel CEO James Rogers explained last year at a Spoon event. At the end of the day, he said, “we have to make the most environmentally beneficially solution the cheapest, easiest solution.”

Apeel Acquires ImpactVision to Fight Food Waste With Hyperspectral Imaging

Apeel officially announced today is has acquired machine learning company ImpactVision for an undisclosed amount. The plan is to integrate ImpactVision’s hyperspectral imaging technology into Apeel’s applications systems at produce packing houses and distribution centers in North America, South America, and Europe. This is Apeel’s first major acquisition, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. To date, ImpactVision has raised $2.8 million.

Apeel’s existing application systems involve coating different types of produce with what the company calls its “shelf-life extension technology” — an edible, plant-based coating that gets applied to produce after harvest. The coatings extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by keeping moisture trapped inside the produce and oxygen out. In doing so, the rate of decay significantly slows. 

With the ImpactVision acquisition, Apeel will be able to add further analysis of the produce to its operations. ImpactVision’s tech collects and processes hyperspectral images of each individual piece of produce. Through machine learning models, the system can identify cues in the produce around its freshness, degree of maturity, and phytonutrient content.

Based on those elements, suppliers and distributors can then decide where each piece of produce should go. Those  with a shorter ripening window can ship to retailers geographically closer to the supplier, for instance, to avoid excess food spoilage. By way of example, today’s news announcement gave the following scenario: “If a produce supplier sees that one avocado will ripen tomorrow while another will ripen in 4 days, they know that one has more time to travel and should be sent to the retailer that is further away.”

Writing in a blog post today, Apeel CEO James Rogers noted that through the acquisition, “Apeel will now be able to integrate hyperspectral imaging technology into our supply chains, enabling us to provide new insights to our customers, both upstream and downstream, ranging from ripeness prediction to nutritional characteristics, even information on how the produce was grown; the very aspects that make every individual piece of fruit unique.”  

Rogers added that Apeel has already started the process of upgrading its application systems to include hyperspectral camera capabilities. The company says it has 30 supplier integrations on three continents with plans to double that number by the end of 2021.

OneThird Raises €1.5M for Its Food-Waste-Fighting Tech

Netherlands-based food tech company OneThird announced today it has raised €1.5 million ($1.8 million USD) for its shelf-life-prediction technology that helps growers, retailers, and distributors cut down on food waste. SHIFT Invest and Oost NL participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The new funds will partly go towards further developing OneThird’s tech, which it calls a “fresh produce quality prediction platform.” The platform consists of a handheld scanner, near-infrared sensors, artificial intelligence, and data analytics used in combination to “look inside” the produce and determine its remaining shelf life.

“Our unique prediction technology allows quality inspectors throughout the food supply chain to get immediate feedback about shelf life and other quality parameters of fresh produce and take better decisions,” Marco Snikkers, founder of OneThird, said in today’s press release. 

OneThird says that its technology can work in multiple stages of the supply chain. Growers, for example, can use the platform to determine where they should ship different batches of produce. Distributors can use it to make routing decisions, while retailers can train their staff to assess the freshness of produce in the store.

The point of all this, of course, is to cut down on food waste. As underscored by the OneThird company name, a third of all the world’s food goes to waste each year, with $408 billion spent in the U.S. alone to grow, process, transport, and store food that is never consumed. The waste has a number of consequences, from environmental degradation to people going hungry to lost money for retailers, distributors, and growers.

OneThird joins a growing list of companies bringing a variety of food-waste-fighting solutions to market, from Hazel’s packaging inserts to food redistribution companies like Too Good to Go to Apeel’s edible coating.

OneThird will also use its new funds to expand retail pilots of its platform and build out its technical team by acquiring AI specialist firm Impact Analytics.

Hazel Technologies Raises $70M in Series C Funding to Fight Food Waste

Hazel Technologies announced today it has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The round was co-led by the Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund and Temasek. S2G Ventures, Pangea Ventures, Rhapsody Venture Partners, Asahi Kasai Ventures, Jordan Park Group, and the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Foundation also participated. Including the Series C round, Hazel has raised $87 million to date, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Hazel is among those companies using technology to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and in doing so cut down on food waste. Its packaging insert, called a sachet, gets placed in bulk boxes of produce after harvest. The sachet emits 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) gas to inhibit ethylene, which plants produce they age. Different crops have different respiration rates and production levels of ethylene, so there are different sachets for different produce types. Currently, Hazel has sachets for 14 different produce types, including avocados, mangos, plums, pears, and cantaloupe. In December of 2020, the company announced Hazel Root, designed to slow the growth of sprouts in potatoes and other root vegetables.  

The company said that in 2021, its products will be used with “over 6.3 billion pounds” of fresh produce, preventing more than 500 million pounds of food from going to the landfill. 

In 2019, 35 percent of all food in the United States went unsold or uneaten, according to the most recent numbers from nonprofit ReFed. Both national and international goals aim to cut food waste in half by 2030. To do that, waste will have to be reduced at every step of the supply chain, from the farm itself all the way down refrigerators inside the average person’s home.

Hazel’s technology currently aims to prevent loss and waste earlier in the supply chain, just after harvest. Apeel is the other notable competitor here, though it has a completely different approach to extending the lifespan of produce that involves coating individual pieces of produce with a plant-based protection.

Hazel hinted that funds from the Series C round could go towards commercializing a solution meant for further down the food supply chain, at consumer-facing levels like retail and restaurants. 

Apeel Unites Avocado Suppliers Through an Expanded Network Fighting Food Waste

Apeel Sciences announced today that more than 20 leading suppliers from the global avocado industry have joined its network in an effort to keep more food out of landfills. New partners from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe will use Apeel’s plant-based coating technology that extends the life of fruits and vegetables, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Doing so will further reduce food waste at consumer-facing levels like retail and the home.

Apeel’s technology, which is a food-safe powder coating made from plant oils, acts as a barrier that keeps water and oxygen out of the produce items to which it is applied. While the company is working with a few different produce types, among them asparagus and citrus fruits — it’s best known for its avocado coating. Apeel-coated avocados can be found in major U.S. grocery stores. The company said today that in 2020, it kept roughly 5 million avocados out of the landfill, and promises “much greater impacts” in 2021.

Keeping food out of landfills isn’t just a matter of saving grocery retailers and consumers money (though that’s an important benefit). Food waste is a leading contributor to climate change, and produce is one of the most common types of foods to go to waste. Recently, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that 14 percent of the world’s food is lost between the harvest and retail stages of the supply chain.

Apeel’s technology builds time into that food supply chain by extending the shelf life of produce that’s in transit and, depending on the region it’s in, may not have the advantage of cold chain infrastructure to aid in the preservation process. And as CEO James Rogers told me last year, building this time into the supply chain allows produce to reach exporters before it goes bad. Meanwhile, joining Apeel’s network can mean greater access to retail markets for many suppliers. 

“[Food is] only valuable if the underlying infrastructure is there to make it valuable,” he said.

Among those suppliers joining the Apeel network are El Parque in Chile and Agricola Cerro Prieto in Peru. In the U.S., companies like Calavo, Del Monte, and West Pak have also joined the network.

Apeel’s James Rogers on Fixing Our Perishability Problem to Fight Food Waste

“Perishability is so fundamental to the food system it’s almost unchallenged,” James Rogers, founder and CEO of Apeel, said to me this week during a virtual event for The Spoon.

Specifically, he meant that perishability is built into the global food system, whether that means accepting it as a cost of doing business or making sacrifices around quality and nutrition in order to avoid it. Either way, perishability is linked closely to the world’s $2.6 trillion food waste problem, which happens in many different forms up and down the food supply chain.

To get a deeper understanding of both the perishability issue and its relationship to food waste, Rogers and I took some time at this week’s event to walk through the different steps of the food system

As Rogers sees it, there are four main categories of the food system to examine: grower, suppler, retailer, and consumer.

The grower stage involves the actual cultivation of fruits, vegetables, and other perishable items. It’s a point in the supply chain where those involved have to make sacrifices in order to avoid excessive food waste. By way of an example, Rogers described how tomatoes are normally picked when they are still hard and green. The decision about when to harvest the food is based not on when it’s in peak eating condition but on making it last longer as it travels to suppliers and eventually to the grocery store. That works — for the grower. But by disconnecting the fruit from the plant early on, we’re sacrificing flavor and nutritional content, and it means that a consumer could very well buy a tomato from the grocery store and wind up chucking it because of its mediocre taste.

Building more time into the supply chain is a point Rogers has emphasized again and again during our conversations. He is, of course, invested in this idea through his company Apeel, which makes an edible coating for fruits and vegetables that extends their shelf life, in some cases by weeks. His goal, and the goal of others in the food industry, is to build more time into our supply chain so that crops can be picked when nature dictates and not before.

Suppliers feel the time crunch perhaps most acutely of anyone on the food supply chain. These are the people that receive produce from the grower, sort it, box it, and ship it to grocery stores and other buyers. 

“Suppliers have a clock that’s ticking,” Rogers explained. Using another example, he referenced a small farm growing caviar limes, which only last for a couple days. Fruit had to be sorted, packed, and shipped on the same day to avoid spoilage, an issue that was solved once the farm started using Apeel’s coating on the limes.

But while growers and suppliers race to avoid perishability, retailers and other buyers, such as foodservice operations, have it built right into their business model. The typical grocery store builds large fruit and vegetable displays so they can sell more and sell it faster. However, Rogers said the rate at which food ages speeds up by a factor of four once it leaves the walk-in cooler and goes on display.  

“If you want to maximize your sales, you will always want to have a full shelf which leads to waste,” he said, adding that grocers without a waste problem have missed sales opportunities, since demand has outpaced supply.

Apeel is one such solution helping retailers combat the problem of perishability. Others, including Hazel Technologies and StixFresh are also bringing their technologies to retailers with the goal of extending the life of produce.

The last stop on the food supply chain also happens to be the one where the majority of food, at least in the U.S. and Europe, gets wasted. Rogers was quick to point out that “no one wants to waste food.” However, despite the growing number of potential solutions available to consumers to curb food waste, expecting massive shifts in behavior is next to impossible. “Just telling them they shouldn’t waste food doesn’t get to the crux of the issue,” Rogers said during the event. Rather, the strategy should be about helping people create an abundance of food in their homes. Once again, building more time into the life of produce and therefore into the supply chain is what would enable consumers to keep more fresh food at home without the fear of it going to waste.

At the end of the day, he said, “we have to make the most environmentally beneficially solution the cheapest, easiest solution.”

Apeel Raises $30M to Help Smallholder Farmers Fight Food Waste and Access New Markets

Apeel, best known for its edible produce peel that extends the lifespan of fruits and vegetables, announced today it has raised $30 million in funding from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Temasek, and Astanor Ventures. The new funds will be used to help smallholder farmers both reduce food loss and gain access to higher-value markets for their produce.

For this initiative, Apeel is focused primarily on smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. James Rogers, founder and CEO of Apeel, explained during a chat with me this week that in these regions, farmers face a two-pronged problem when it comes to growing and selling produce: time and access.

There is little in the way of cold chain infrastructre in many of these regions, which makes it virtually impossible to keep produce fresh long enough to go from farm to market without spoilage. This lack of cold chain operations is the main cause of food loss in these parts of the world. 

Apeel’s technology, of course, builds time into the food supply chain via its edible peel that coats fruits and vegetables and to keep them fresher longer. But as Rogers noted, that extended shelf life is only truly valuable to farmers if they have access to markets with buyers, which is the other part of the food waste problem for smallholder farmers. Up to now, a lack of extra time when it comes to produce lifespan has barred farmers from reaching buyers outside of local markets and as a result has limited any economic gain.

Apeel’s new funding will in part go towards alleviating that second hurdle. In addition to providing investment, IFC is also partnering with Apeel to create programs that will plug these smallholder farmers into the Apeel supply chain and give them access to markets in the U.S. and Europe, where the economic opportunities are higher.

By way of example, Rogers explained that a mango grown on a smallholder farm in Kenya might sell for 1 cent in a local setting. If that mango makes it to one of the country’s urban centers, it might sell for $1, bringing greater economic gains for the farmer. Getting the mango to even higher-value markets like the U.S. and Europe only increases the economic gains. 

In a sense, the one couldn’t exist without the other when it comes to the combination of Apeel’s technology and its IFC partnership that gives farmers access to exporters. As Rogers explained to me, the technology — that is, the edible peel that extends shelf life — builds more time into the supply chain, enabling the produce to reach exporters before it goes bad. “The time creates the access,” he said.

In more developed countries like the U.S., Apeel has made a name for itself partnering with major retail chains like Kroger and Walmart. The company also raised $250 million in May of this year.

But this latest fundraise and the IFC partnership is Apeel’s first major step into developing countries that experience food waste and loss in the earlier stages of the food supply chain — though such a move has been on the company’s radar for a long time. Rogers explained that when Apeel started a decade ago, one of its goals was to provide the same supply and demand opportunities for people in parts of the world that don’t have refrigeration and cold chain tech.

“[Food is] only valuable if the underlying infrastructure is there to make it valuable,” he said, adding that part of Apeel’s mission with this new fundraise is to “bring demand from some of the largest markets in the world and be able to make the world much larger for these smaller farmers.”

‘Make Food Waste Less Possible’: How Businesses Can Help Consumers Fight Food Waste at Home

Tackling the food waste topic in a 30-minute panel is something of an impossible undertaking, given the size of the problem. That’s why at Day 2 of Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, myself, Apeel Sciences’ CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute, and Alexandria Coari of ReFED zeroed in on a few major causes and solutions around food waste.

One of those was the role of consumer behavior in the fight against food waste. Right now, according to ReFed, 80-plus percent of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, with more than 40 percent of that occurring in our own homes. But is it even realistic to expect consumers — for whom convenience and speed tend to be top priorities — to alter their behaviors around cooking, shopping, and eating in order to bring that number down?

Maybe. But as panelists explained during today’s talk, one of the keys to changing consumer behavior belongs not to the individual but to consumer-facing food businesses — the grocery stores, restaurants, and other retailers of the world.

Coari pointed out that these food businesses have a lot of influence up and down the value chain. Those businesses can enable consumer behavior change by making their environments, whether in the store or in the restaurant, less conducive to food waste to begin with. They can, as Coari said, “Make food waste less possible.”

Apeel, which makes a natural coating for produce to extend its shelf life, is one such example. Selling, say, avocados preserved in Apeel’s coating means consumers have more time between buying the product and eating it at home. Extending this lifespan, there’s a better chance the avocado will get eaten before it goes bad.

Neither the coating nor the extra several days of shelf-life happen because of anything a consumer does. They’re just buying the avocado. Instead, Apeel has used a technology and process that allow a consumer to get more mileage out of the food they buy.

Cecchini pointed out that educating consumers and helping them shift their perspective around certain foods is another important area of consumer behavior change. Take the so-called ugly produce: misshapen-yet-edible fruits and vegetables that are often sold at discounted prices. Cecchini suggests removing monikers like “ugly” or “imperfect” from the food waste vocabulary and trying to put a more positive spin on the concept to make it appeal to as many consumers as possible. In that way, grocery retailers, too, might not have to put as much effort into cosmetically perfect produce and wind up throwing out the rest.

There are tons of other examples of business innovation influencing food waste behavior at the consumer level. While we certainly didn’t cover all of them in the span of a half-hour, today’s talk certainly left me thinking about what food businesses can do to help us get more mileage out of the food we have and waste less of it in the process. As Rogers said at one point, “We can’t hope people [will] do the right thing. We have to make the right thing the easiest, cheapest, best for the planet thing to do.”

Produce Grower Houweling’s Group Partners With Apeel to Ditch Plastic-Wrapped Cucumbers

Greenhouse vegetable grower Houweling’s Group announced this week it has partnered with Apeel to launch its plastic-free cucumbers at select Walmart locations, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Cucumbers very often land on grocery store shelves shrink-wrapped in plastic. This is done to protect the skin, which on a variety like an English cucumber, is especially thin. The plastic wrapping also extends the shelf life of the cucumber once it’s in your fridge.

Apeel, which raised $250 million in May of this year, is in the business of extending produce shelf life without the need for extra packaging materials. The company makes an edible “peel” that can provide the protection and shelf-life extension of plastic. It does this with a foodsafe powder derived from plant oils. When applied to produce, it creates a barrier that keeps water and oxygen out. Apeel has developed different proprietary coatings for different produce types, including apples, avocados, and, now, cucumbers. 

Apeel is one of several companies working to make produce last longer. It’s most notable counterparts right now are Stix Fresh, which makes a sticker that can extend produce shelf life by two weeks when placed on the fruit or vegetable, and Hazel Technologies, whose packaging inserts for bulk fruit and vegetable boxes slow ripening. Apeel’s most obviously parallel competitor is Sufresca, a company that also makes an edible coating for produce.

The partnership with Houweling’s Group marks the first time Apeel has used its coating technology to not just extend the life of produce but also do away with extra packaging. Houweling’s said in this week’s press release that every 500,000 cases of English cucumbers shipped with Apeel’s coating eliminates the equivalent of 820,000 single-use plastic water bottles from the supply chain.