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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Apeel

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. 

Wrap It Up: Innovation in Edible Solutions to Extend Food Lifespans (a Spoon Plus Report)

Suppliers, especially large warehouse distributors, have several strategies they currently use to extend the lifespan of produce. One is refrigeration. Produce can be stored in cold warehouses to slow down the ripening process and make it last longer. Another is to install vents in the warehouses to remove ethylene, the gas that causes fruit to ripen, from storage. Some warehouses even use gases like nitrogen and sulphur to counteract the effects of ethylene, thus keeping fruit preserved in an unripe state until they’re ready to ship to retailers. Some fruits, like lemons and apples, are also coated in an artificial wax to keep them from rotting.

All of these solutions have their drawbacks. Vents are expensive to install, using gases to regulate ethylene is not proven to be effective, and artificial wax is unappetizing. Regulating produce freshness at warehouses also does not help once that fruit or vegetable has left the supplier and is sitting on a retail shelf or in a consumer kitchen.

However, over the past several years, innovators have begun experimenting with new ways to extend the lifespan of fresh produce. These solutions are meant to be a more sustainable, healthy, and versatile alternative to current practices used in warehouses.

This report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus, includes analysis of key players Apeel, Sufresca, Stixfresh, and Hazel Technologies, a look at opportunities in this fast-changing space, the impact of COVID and a look forward at what’s next.

New subscribers to Spoon Plus can use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual plan today. Go here to learn more. 

How a Materials Scientist Invented an Edible Way to Keep Your Avocados Ripe for Longer (Spoon Plus)

Apeel just raised $250 million from investors including celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry. I spoke with Rogers a few days before they announced the funding to learn more about how he, a materials scientist, got the idea to switch from creating solar panels to developing produce technology. We also got into bigger discussions around food waste, how tech is mitigating it, and the ways in which COVID is affecting our relationship with food (and waste).

The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Apeel Sciences Raises $250M to Extend Produce Shelf Life

Apeel, the startup that makes a natural coating to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables, announced today via a release emailed to The Spoon that it had raised $250 million in fresh financing. The round was led by GIC with participation from Viking Global Investors, Upfront Ventures, Tao Capital Partners and Rock Creek Group. Celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry have also joined as minority, non-participatory investors.

Founded in 2015, Apeel is fighting the global fresh food waste problem by creating a foodsafe powder coating out of plant oils which, when applied to produce, can double or triple their lifespan. The “peel” functions as a barrier to keep water in and oxygen out, fighting the two main causes of produce rotting. Each fruit or vegetable has its own proprietary coating.

Currently, Apeel avocados are available in retailers in the U.S., including 1,110 Kroger stores. Last year the company launched its Apeel-treated avocados on store shelves in Denmark and Germany. In Germany it also offers coated mandarins and oranges.

Apeel’s CEO James Rogers also told me in an interview last week that, in addition to citrus and avocados, the company also has coatings for asparagus and cucumbers in the works.

Extending the lifespan of fresh produce can not only cut down on food waste but can also equate to major savings for retailers. So it’s no surprise that Apeel isn’t the only company working to make your fruit stay fresh for longer. StixFresh has a sticker that can extend produce shelf life by two weeks, and Hazel Technologies makes packaging inserts for bulk fruit and vegetable harvest boxes to slow ripening. Perhaps most similar to Apeel, Italian company Sufresca also makes an edible coating which it claims can extend produce shelf life by several weeks.

According to Rogers, Apeel distinguishes itself by using only edible, natural elements to “copy the way that Nature does it.” They also develop different coatings for each fruit or vegetable to optimize its lifespan. “Every piece of produce is a living, breathing thing, [and] it needs its own optimized little microclimate in order to survive optimally,” said Rogers.

Food waste is one of the leading contributors to global warming, and fresh foods — like fruit and vegetables — are one of the most common foods to go to waste. Of course, wasting food is also bad news for a grocery store’s bottom line — and consumers, for that matter.

Thus far, both consumers and grocery stores seem to be on board by Apeel’s products. Rogers told me that when markets put signs indicating that their produce has been coated with Apeel, they see double-digit increases in sales. “That starts to make sense when you realize that a lot of people are pricing waste into their purchase decisions.”

Today’s raise brings Apeel’s total funding to $360.1 million. With its new capital, Apeel will continue to focus on expansion in U.S. and Europe, but it will also allocate funds to support its initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America.

Apeel Avocados Now on Store Shelves in Europe

Apeel, the startup that makes a powder coating to extend the shelf life of produce, announced today that its specially treated avocados are now available to shoppers in Denmark and Germany.

Apeel is looking to fight the global food waste problem by creating an edible powder coating that is mixed with water and applied to produce. As we’ve covered before:

To create that barrier for produce, Apeel basically takes parts of plants left behind on farms (e.g., tomato rinds, seeds and pulps) and extracts particular lipids from them. Those lipids are then combined in specific ratios, which vary depending on the produce, to create the ideal protective barrier for each fruit and vegetable.

Apeel avocados are coming to Europe through a partnership with Nature’s Pride, a Belgium-based supplier of produce. The partnership was actually announced back in February. According to today’s press announcement, the European Commission has now authorized the use of the food-based ingredients in its edible coating.

Apeel claims that it has reduced food waste at the retail level by more than 50 percent. In September, the company’s avocados started being sold at 1,100 Kroger locations across the U.S.

As noted, Apeel is part of a wave of organizations looking to attack the food waste problem in this country and abroad. StixFresh uses a sticker to double the shelf life of produce. Varcode uses blockchain temperature sensors and the cloud to monitor the cold chain. And researchers at Washington State University developed and just released the Cosmic Crisp apple, which can last in storage for up to a year.

For those living in Europe who want to rush out to buy an Apeel avocado (or, you know, take your time, it’ll last), they can be found at Edeka and Netto stores in Germany, and Salling Group stores Føtex and Bilka in Denmark.

Apeel to Launch Its Longer-Lasting Produce in Kroger Stores Across the U.S.

Apeel Sciences, whose plant-based coatings extend the shelf life of produce, announced today it has partnered with Kroger to make its longer-lasting avocados available at over 1,100 of the grocery retailer’s stores in the U.S.

This widespread launch follows a pilot the two companies launched in 2018 in select stores around the Midwest.

Apeel was born out of a concern over the amount of food in the country that gets wasted every year due to food spoilage. Roughly 40 percent of food waste happens in the home, as anyone whose ever bought an avocado and had it go bad almost immediately knows.

To fight this, Apeel makes a plant-based powder food producers can mix with water to and coat over produce items before they get shipped out for distribution and retail. That coating creates a barrier that retains the water in side the produce and regulates how fast oxygen gets into the plant. Cloaked in this powder, produce stays fresher longer and requires less refrigeration. According to the company’s website, this has led to a more than 50 percent decrease in food waste. Bonus: the produce doesn’t have to be coated in the usual wax covering, either.

Apeel avocados are already available in the European market through a partnership with Belgium-based importer Nature’s Pride. And this past August, Apeel raised a $70 million Series C round.

The company is also using its partnership with Kroger to release two new produce items: limes and asparagus. According to the press release, those will be available at stores in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati this fall.

Apeel’s expansion comes at a time when more companies fighting food waste in the home are starting to emerge. What was only a few months ago a very small category in the food waste landscape now has players like Hazel Technologies, whose biodegradable packaging inserts extend the life of produce, Stix Fresh, who says it can double your avocado’s shelf life with a sticker, and Cambridge Crops, who also makes a protective layer for produce. We’ll undoubtedly be seeing many more companies come to market as consumers start to wake up to the reality that the food waste battle has to be fought first and foremost at home.

This Laminated Card Claims to Keep Food Fresher, Longer

It sounds like an infomercial pitch: simply place a small, laminated card under your food and be amazed as it keeps it fresher, longer! In other words, the Food Freshness Card sounds too good to be true. And yet, as USA Today reports, this innovation (?) won an Edison Award for Food Tech Solutions last week alongside other Spoon regulars like Chowbotics and Nima.

The Food Freshness card looks like a type of holographic Pokemon card that would be sold at that hardcore natural grocer that carries carob chips instead of chocolate and smells of sandalwood. It’s developed by Nature’s Frequencies, which doesn’t bother to explain how the Food Freshness Card works on its website. The company does, however, hold three patents on the technology used to manufacture the card, the abstract from one of which reads:

A food freshness card is disclosed which emits energy tuned to the natural frequency of fresh foods.

It then talks about scalar waves and goes on to say:

A material placed on a receiving coil at the receiving electrode receives the resultant wave information programming the material to emit energy tuned to the natural frequencies of fresh foods. Food or liquid placed within an effective radius of the card is kept fresher by exposure to the energetic information emitted by the material.

OK. Sure.

While the website may have a dearth of information on the inner workings of the Food Freshness Card, it has an abundance of videos showing the card in action. The card is placed under an array of fruits, vegetables and even bread, and through the magic of time lapse footage we see the food sitting atop the card last longer while its non-carded competition rots.

The card’s effectiveness was independently tested by Modern Testing Services, but I don’t know if it actually works (I reached out to them for follow up questions). I do know that the Food Freshness Card costs $75, is supposed to last one year, and got 117 backers on Indiegogo. FWIW, Nature’s Frequency will also sell you an Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) Cell Phone Chip (“to help assist your body in fighting off negative effects of EMF”), as well as Weight Management and Sleep assistance chips (all $75 a piece).

We’re all for companies fighting the good fight against food waste. Apeel makes a plant-based powder coating to keep food fresher longer, and StixFresh maintains food freshness simply by applying a sticker.

So who knows? Perhaps this laminated miracle does work as advertised. I’m just too skeptical right now to hand over my credit card for the Food Freshness Card without more digging.

Apeel Brings Its Longer-Lasting Avocados to Europe

Holy (long-lasting) guacamole! Today Apeel Sciences announced that it’s partnering with Belgium-based produce importer Nature’s Pride to bring their long-lasting avocados to the European market.

If you don’t know, Apeel Sciences is a California-based startup that makes an edible post-harvest coating for fruits and vegetables (called Edipeel) which can significantly increase produce shelf life. Edipeel-coated avocados — Apeel’s first product — are currently available in select grocery stores in the Midwest, including a string of Costco’s.

Nature’s Pride’s new Edipeel-coasted avocados will have a co-branded label to increase consumer awareness around Apeel’s mission. The companies expect that the long-lasting avocados will be available mid-2019 in select retail stores in Europe, as long as they gain EU regulatory approval. There’s no word as to where in Europe Apeel/Nature’s Pride will first roll out the avocados.

The timing is ripe (sorry, I had to). Roughly 88 million tons of food is wasted in the EU every year. In 2012, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that roughly 50 percent of fruits and vegetables in the EU go to waste, and over half of that waste occurs after food is brought home from the store.

Apeel’s edible coating won’t help Europeans (or anyone) be better about eating all of their produce, but it will give them a longer window before said produce goes bad. According to their website, Apeel’s technology has led to a more than 50 percent decrease in food waste at the retail level. If those statistics hold true in Europe, it could take a huge dent out of those 88 million tons of food waste.

In August of last year Apeel raised $70 million, bringing the total funding for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed startup to just north of $110 million. Next up, Apeel plans to tackle citrus and asparagus.

Apeel Sciences Raises $70M to Extend Avocados’ Shelf Life

This week Apeel Sciences, the startup known for its plant-based peels that keep produce fresh longer, raised a cool $70 million. The Series C round was led by Viking Global Investors, a $26 billion hedge fund behemoth, and brings the total funding for the Bill Gates-backed startup to $110 million.

Apeel’s solution to fighting produce degradation is called Edipeel. It’s a plant-based powder which fruit and vegetable producers can mix with water and use to coat their wares before shipping them off for distribution and retail. By mimicking the natural coatings in fruits like lemons and avocados (yeah, guys, they’re a fruit), Edipeel keeps produce fresh by warding off oxygen and maintaining moisture levels. It’s also a healthier and more environmentally friendly alternative to wax, which is used as a coating for fruits and vegetables today.

Apeel’s technology also cuts down dramatically on food waste throughout the supply chain, in grocery stores, and even in the home. As Jenn Marston wrote when she profiled Apeel a few months ago, “less waste and longer transport time windows are a win for everyone involved in getting food from the farm to the store.”

In addition to their not-so-shabby funding, Apeel also announced this week that they had added former Whole Foods executive Walter Robb to their board. Do we smell some Edipeel-coated avocados (and more) on Whole Foods shelves in the future? Thinking on a bigger scale, Apeel’s technology would also come in handy for Amazon-Whole Foods grocery delivery orders, as it could keep in-transit produce fresher as it travels from the farm to your doorstep.

So far, Edipeel-coated avocados — which last twice as long as typical avocados — are being piloted in roughly 100 grocery stores in the Midwest, including 30 Costco locations. Next up: Apeel plans to apply their tech to citrus and asparagus.