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Apeel

July 9, 2020

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. 

June 1, 2020

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. 

May 26, 2020

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.

December 9, 2019

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.

September 18, 2019

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.

April 8, 2019

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.

February 4, 2019

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.

August 1, 2018

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.

June 23, 2018

Food Tech News Roundup: Cold Brew, Avocados, and Robot-Made Burgers

Were we the only ones whose heads were spinning with all the food tech news this week? Especially the funding announcements. Corporate catering company ezCater raised $100 million, cultured fish startup Finless Foods snagged $3.5 million, and Hungry raised $1.5 million. And that was just in the U.S.! There were quite a few other big fundraising announcements from food innovation companies around the world, from food delivery to meal replacement shakes.

Here are some of the other food tech news bits — funding-related and otherwise — from around the web this week. This one’s a bit longer than usual, so we’ve divided it up into categories for you.

Crowdfunding updates

Dash Rapid Cold Brew Available In Stores
Tired of waiting a grueling 24 hours for your cold brew to be ready? This week Dash Rapid Cold Brew, which claims to create cold brew coffee in 5 minutes, is now available in stores and online. It’s the latest product from Storebound, the company that brought you such tech-enabled appliances as the Pancakebot 3D Printer and the SoBro Coffee Table. After raising funds for the product on IndieGoGo, the product found its way online earlier this year to mixed reviews. At the time, the company told us they were working on adjustments to the product, so let’s hope they’ve gotten those fixed as the product heads to brick and mortar retail for $129.99.

IoT-enabled brewing airlock PLAATO ships
This week PLAATO, an IoT powered smart airlock we wrote about last year that lets you monitor beer fermentation  via phone app, has started shipping. The Norwegian project had raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter, beating its $30,000 goal in the first 12 hours. The PLAATO, which monitors fermentation levels, CO2 amounts, and temperature throughout the brewing process, will retail for $149.

Robots and… more funding.

Creator offers $6 cheeseburgers made by robots
Restaurant/culinary robotics company Creator opened up their robotic burger chef to a select few this week before their June 27th opening. The San Francisco-based company, formerly Momentum Machines, will serve up robot-created cheeseburgers for $6. Automated chefs are all the rage right now, from Miso Robotics’s burger-flipping Flippy to Chowbotics’ automated food bowls. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, be sure to check out The Spoon Automat podcast, which covers all things food robots.

 

Bossa Nova raises funds to scale up inventory robots
This week Pittsburgh-based Bossa Nova raised $29 million to increase the production of their mobile inventory robots. The robots work perform tasks like shelf-scanning to facilitate re-stocking in retailers like Walmart (its currently in more than 40 of its stores), and are apparently 50% more efficient than human workers. This latest funding round brings Bossa Nova’s total war chest to $70 million.

Everything else

Beyond Meat goes to Canada
A&W Services is bringing Beyond Meat burgers north of the border into Canada. Starting July 9th, the national restaurant chain will offer the plant-based patties in its nearly 1,000 locations across the country. This will make A&W the first Canadian chain to carry Beyond products, and will also mark Beyond Meat’s largest restaurant chain partnership to date.

 

Apeel avocados now on Costco shelves
Midwest Costco stores got a new item in their produce section this week: avocados coated with a plant-based protective layer by Apeel Sciences, which should make the fruit last up to four times longer. According to the Washington Post, Costco hopes to roll out these long-living avocados in their stores nationwide. The next Apeel-ified produce to look out for: citrus and asparagus.

 

Nomiku debuts Nima-tested gluten-free meals
This week sous vide startup Nomiku partnered with allergen-testing sensor Nima to put out a bundle of gluten-free meals. Nima’s portable, handheld sensor can detect even trace amounts of gluten, and they just unveiled their peanut sensor a few months ago. The bundle will source from Nomiku’s library of gluten-free options.

Did we miss something? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

April 18, 2018

Apeel Sciences Wants to Save Your Produce, One Edible Peel at a Time

Apeel Sciences founder and CEO James Rogers was more concerned with paint than produce when he first came up with the idea for the company.

At the time, Rogers was getting his PhD in Materials Sciences, developing a solar paint that could harvest energy. But after hearing a story on the radio about global hunger, he found himself wondering why such a thing existed if an abundance of food was grown every year.

The culprit, as Rogers would discover, wasn’t a lack of food; it was food spoilage. Thus Apeel Sciences was born, and Rogers and his team set to work developing a plant-based peel for produce that, once applied, extends the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. The product, called Apeel, acts as a barrier that retains water inside the produce longer and regulates how fast oxygen gets in.

Stepping away from paint for a moment, Rogers used his background in materials sciences to address the problem, applying the same concepts metallurgists used when creating a coating to protect steel from the elements. Since produce, like iron, degrades when exposed to environmental conditions for a long period of time, couldn’t we use the same solution—a barrier—to slow down the decay?

In trying to answer that question, Rogers discovered that everything needed to create such a barrier already exists—in the food itself. Out of that revelation, (and a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation), Apeel was born.

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.

From there, the company sends its specialized Apeel to farmers and suppliers in the form a lightweight powder, which they combine with water and apply to the produce. “Once applied, [Apeel] leaves behind an imperceptible amount of edible plant material on the surface of the fruit that naturally slows down water loss and oxidation—the factors that cause fresh food to spoil,” says Michelle Masek, Head of Marketing for Apeel.

Of course, the product’s main appeal (please kill me for that) is that consumers will have food that stays fresher longer, and isn’t coated in wax for protection against the elements. For example, Masek says Apeel can, “at minimum,” double the shelf life of avocados. Considering that (at least up north) most avocados are already shriveling by the time they hit the major chain grocery stores, that’s welcome news.

But it’s not just consumers who win with the longer shelf life. “It benefits every member of the fresh food supply chain by minimizing waste and extending the transportability of the produce [for] farmers, shippers and retailers,” says Masek. In other words, less waste and longer transport time windows are a win for everyone involved in getting food from the farm to the store.

Right now, Apeel Sciences works with everyone from smallholder farmers and local organic growers to large food brands. It’s currently only focused on fresh produce. Masek also assures me the company is scaling as we speak: “We’re ramped up in a new 105k square-foot facility in Goleta, California where, as an example of scale, we can make enough product to service the global avocado supply.”

Whether the company does end up serving the global supply of avocados isn’t clear. By some accounts, the produce industry didn’t exactly welcome Apeel with open arms. That said, few industries have a uniformly positive reaction when a new player comes in with a “disruptive” idea. And with $40 million in funding so far, plus support from the Gates foundation, Apeel may very well have a real shot at replacing that wax that covers the produce at your local grocer.

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