This Edible Peel Extends the Shelf Life of Produce
Jan 23, 2021
These avocados will soon be treated with Apeel’s protective layer.
Photography courtesy of Apeel Sciences
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Many of us have reached into the fridge and found avocados that are too brown to put on toast, strawberries that are coated in fuzzy mold or kale that has shriveled up and sprouted black and white fungus. This lowly produce often gets pitched straight into the trash, becoming part of the 80 billion pounds of food waste that rot in US landfills each year.
And yet despite those mountainous piles of food waste, hundreds of millions of people around the world live in hunger. This stark picture compelled James Rogers, a materials scientist in California, to create something that could solve some aspect of the food waste problem. He decided to figure out a way to stop food from spoiling.