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Bill Gates Backs A Company That Doubles the Shelf Life of Vegetables (cnn.com)
Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shared this article from CNN Business:
One company is doubling the shelf-life of avocados, citrus and other produce by taking a chemical-free cue from nature.... After researching the issue, Apeel CEO James Rogers realized spoilage was at the root of the problem. In 2012, he founded Apeel Sciences, which aims to extend the shelf-life of food and reduce waste. Rather than relying on chemical agents to preserve fresh produce, it develops a special protective coating to slow down the rotting process. The company is backed by Micorosoft cofounder Bill Gates and venture capitalist Andressen Horowitz, and has raised $110 million dollars in financing to date. Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, recently joined its board of directors....
Food typically rots when moisture exits, oxygen gets in and mold takes over. To prevent this, Apeel takes the skins, seeds and pulp of homogeneous fruits or veggies -- such as grapes from a winery or tomato skins from a ketchup factor -- and presses out an oil rich in fat lipids. The company turns the oil into a colorless, odorless, tasteless powder that is tailored for each type of produce to which it will be applied. It's then mixed with water by the suppliers before it arrives at the store. The produce is either rinsed in or sprayed with the mixture at packaging facilities, essentially creating a second "peel"...
Apeel says the process is doubling the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and can triple it inside their lab. It aims to extend the life of some produce by four times.
The article points out that nearly a trillion dollars of food still goes to waste each year around the globe -- and at least one store testing Apeel's product has already reported a 50% boost in their profits on avocados thanks to the longer shelf life.
The FDA recognizes Apeel's product as safe, and it's already being used in more than 200 grocery-selling stores in the U.S., including Costco and Kroger.
Food typically rots when moisture exits, oxygen gets in and mold takes over. To prevent this, Apeel takes the skins, seeds and pulp of homogeneous fruits or veggies -- such as grapes from a winery or tomato skins from a ketchup factor -- and presses out an oil rich in fat lipids. The company turns the oil into a colorless, odorless, tasteless powder that is tailored for each type of produce to which it will be applied. It's then mixed with water by the suppliers before it arrives at the store. The produce is either rinsed in or sprayed with the mixture at packaging facilities, essentially creating a second "peel"...
Apeel says the process is doubling the shelf life of fruits and vegetables and can triple it inside their lab. It aims to extend the life of some produce by four times.
The article points out that nearly a trillion dollars of food still goes to waste each year around the globe -- and at least one store testing Apeel's product has already reported a 50% boost in their profits on avocados thanks to the longer shelf life.
The FDA recognizes Apeel's product as safe, and it's already being used in more than 200 grocery-selling stores in the U.S., including Costco and Kroger.
Altered Carbon has a much more interesting notion of a "sleeve".
Solve for the latter, you solve for the former.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Isn't that saying the same thing 3 times?
What's done with all the skinny lipids?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I get what they are tryin gto imply here, but saying it doesn't use chemicals but then say it applies a protective coating. Is the coating not made of chemicals???
They make a fridge with a special compartment with a lower percentage of oxygen that extends the shelf life of anything perishable you put in there.
I can't be the only one wondering about the nature of this miraculous product which uses no chemicals, yet somehow manifests in the material world as a coating.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
we've already got more than enough food to end world hunger. The problem isn't production, it's distribution. Stuff like this makes me love science.
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I agree with you whole-heartedly.
Please stop eating. Now.
The grocery stores were ordering X amount of product because everyone knew that on average a certain percentage was going to spoil. Now that order is going to be less because of less spoilage, and lower prices.
Does this work better than wax applied to apples and other fruit? There is a paper on wax coating avocado's from 1997
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
So I'm not clear what this new company is bringing to the table - does wax (lipids) extracted from peels contain other beneficial compounds.
So he's developed chemical that he sprays on shit and calls it chemical free? This is a true marvel of modern marketing.
is not by and of itself "news".
It is not news because Bill invested in Apeel years ago. There is no actual "news" in TFA.
It is also not news that their product is "an oil rich in fat lipids", but it would be news if was an oil NOT rich in fat lipids. That would be like dehydrated water.
You would be amazed how much of hong kong is actually non developed land.
it's a political choice problem, which has roots in .. well. you need to still have facilities to handle all the extra population. where the income generators are tends to end up being expensive to live.
like, inexpensive housing is already really really inexpensive. but it's not in the right place. way under 100km from hong kong you can rent a house for the same money that gets you a literal metal fence box in hong kong. like a real house with bedrooms, bathrooms and stuff. a hut that does for a dwelling is a lot more inexpensive than that then again.
anyhow, that a trillion dollars worth of food just spoils tells that spoiling food is actually really cheap, hence it ending up spoilt and not eaten.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Does that mean, we get tomatoes back?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Is your mind still living in the 1977s?
Population growth is flattening.
The only regions with starvations are war zones and areas where war lords rule instead of a "government".
World wide 40% to 50% of all harvested food is thrown away ... not an issue of shelf life. More an issue of "does not look good enough to be put on the shelf" and oh, it is already close to "best used before" date. Or people buy it and don't eat it.
The planet has no population problem. It has a "robber baron capitalism" problem.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The new part is not the idea of coating to delay rot. That has been done for years, usually with waxes or gases.
Apparently, they are simply working out a new coating that like many others before it has its origins in nature, followed by many manipulations that one does not find in nature.
If we feed everyone today, soon we will have ten billion people on Earth.
This is complete nonsense, and the exact opposite of the truth.
People react to food insecurity, environmental stress, social turmoil, and high mortality by having MORE KIDS and investing less in each. The highest population growth in the world in in Niger, one of the world's poorest countries, affected by drought, famine, and civil war. The highest birthrate in Asia is in Afghanistan.
The way to lower birthrates is peacekeeping, better healthcare, better nutrition, reduced infant mortality, education, and urbanization. When people are confident that their children will survive, they will stop popping out more and invest in those they already have. This is what has happened repeatedly all over the globe.
anyhow, that a trillion dollars worth of food just spoils tells that spoiling food is actually really cheap, hence it ending up spoilt and not eaten.
When I'm not working, I live in Thailand.
While it is "not a secret" that in Germany e.g. supermarkets alone throw away 40% of all fresh food (obviously not canned food etc.) similar amounts get thrown away by the population. Thrown away! Not fed to livestock or animals.
Here in Thailand the amount of food thrown away feels to be 90%. Stuff I would eat, my GF throws away as "might be spoiled". While from the outside it looks like a poor country, food is so cheap, no one cares. I mean: no one cares about keeping food stored properly and eating it next day. Yesterday we made rice ... oh, we only eat half of it? But it is "normal rice"? I want "sticky rice" now! So we cook sticky rice, and tomorrow we throw away the rice from yesterday ... we not even eat 50% of the rice we cook.
Unbelievable. My parents were born during and shortly after the war. I was raised as in "you don't throw away food" ... and most importantly if it is meat or fish. Here they have family of 5, but buy for ten to share with neighbours or relatives. But those do the same!! So we walk to the neighbour give him 2 roasted fish and he gives us a roasted chicken.
At home he and we still have 2 times as much as we can eat.
And that happens every day.
What I meant with "not fed to livestock" at least vegetables here are fed to buffaloes, cattle or elephants.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
in about half the time the wholesale does.
The planet has no population problem. It has a "robber baron capitalism" problem
Very well said. And being that we are presently in Late Stage Capitalism, the problem will only get worse. Here in the US we've seen mass-fraud become a standard business model on Wall Street, the ever increasing greed in a market where most the money is already in very few hands will all but assuredly reach a point to where the US becomes a starving nation of mass poverty
Population growth is flattening.
At best, that's only a temporary phenomenon. You cannot stop evolution.
I bought some powdered water at the store once. I had no idea what I was supposed to add to it though.
Robber barons indeed. That’s why North Korea and Venezuela have no problems with people getting enough food. Capitalist societies seem to have the opposite problem. There’s so much excess that obesity is killing far more people than a lack of food.
Good thing those are all chemical free. Don't want chemicals in your food do you?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
De-hydrogensulphatized battery acid. Make sure you use the pristine stuff, unless you live in an area with lead piping; you won't notice a difference with your ordinary tap water then anyway.
Disclaimer: IANAWWE.
I'd be delighted if I could buy sulfite-preserved shredded lettuce at the grocery store. I don't have sulfite allergies, so they're harmless to me... and I absolutely HATE wasting most of a $2 bag of shredded lettuce because it ends up turning brown before I have enough time to use even half of it.
I feel the same way about cat food. Somewhere along the line, marketing departments got the crazy idea that high-quality cat food has to be "all natural" and free of artificial flavors. The problem is, a cat who's been eating artificially-flavored cat food since birth won't EAT cat food made without artificial flavorings, because it just doesn't taste good to them. To an average cat, high-quality "all natural" food made without artificial flavorings is about as appealing as liver & broccoli to a small child (or adult, for that matter). Humans will eat almost anything if we're hungry and desperate enough... cats won't. They'll literally starve themselves to death before eating food that they don't like. So... I continue my quest to find anything better-quality than Fancy Feast that my cats will actually eat, and keep spending $1.50-2/can on random high-quality foods to try every few days that they ultimately just sniff at & walk away from in protest.
I am under the impression that many fruit are already sprayed with a neutral edible wax?
Wikipedia says this has been done since the 12th or 13th centuries (for fermentation? How does that work? Do you end up with alcoholic apples? Sounds neat!), and since the 1920 commercially for preservation and aesthetic purposes.
I agree that assuming "not synthetic = safer" is a fallacy. But in this particular case, Apeel's coating is extracted from fruits that are already Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) by national food regulators.
Technically, we're likely to end up with 10 billion+ people on Earth within the next century or so, even IF everyone became educated, well-fed, and lived in peace starting tomorrow afternoon. Why? Historically, it takes a couple of generations for affluence & education to "sink in" -- and overcome parental nagging.
Take India. Its population has almost doubled within the past few decades, even though its education level, affluence, urbanization, food, and everything else has approached modern first-world norms. Why? Nagging parents who'll never give them a moment of peace until they have at least three kids. They know there's no reason to have more than 2 kids, they probably don't even WANT more than 2 kids (or any)... but all they EVER hear is their mom complaining because she wants more grandkids. The serious push-back against nagging parents takes another generation or two after everything else has settled down.
Even if you assume that India & China are both mostly over the curve, Africa hasn't even STARTED its final baby boom yet. And there are plenty of other countries in Asia that are still either in the early stages of it, or right in the middle of it.
Even in the US, we still have occasional ripples. When GenX was growing up, families with more than 2 kids were kind of rare, and families with more than 3 kids were almost unheard of unless you had a blended family with two divorced parents who brought two kids apiece into the new marriage. Fast forward to GenX adulthood... 1.9 kids, right according to plan... then, out of the blue... a random, unexpected romantic weekend involving sex for the first time in years (and probably years after the last time birth control was used), followed by baby #3 nine months later. Oops.
Millennials are less likely to have the same problem... not due to better birth control practices, but the simple fact of delaying first-time motherhood until well past 30. GenX women who had baby #1 in their early 20s were still in their late 30s when child #1 got sent away to college & the marital festivities began. Millennial women who had baby #1 at 35 will be approaching 50 by the time their kids have their first overnight school trip in high school, making baby #3 at that point extremely unlikely.
So what? Evolution doens't naturally tend to overburdening the environment. In fact on islands where species evolved with no predators, and thus their greatest threat to survival was overburdening the environment, they evolved to self-regulate their population growth, responding to environmental stress by not mating.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What percentage of still-pristine canned goods does your supermarket throw away? Far less than fruit or vegetables I'll wager, and the "keep the shelves stocked" pressure is exactly the same for both - so what's the difference?
Cans will sit on the shelf basically forever, so there's very little pressure to get the old stuff off the shelves faster than it sells. Throwing away product costs you money - you usually only do it if it's no longer saleable. And the longer something can remain saleable while sitting on the shelf, the easier it is to match the rate you purchase replacements the rate at which they sell.
And nobody is processing the food - they're just putting a protective coating on it. Wash the coating off, and you've got the exact same food you used to have - it just lasted longer on the shelf. In some cases that may even translate to tastier fruit, since it can be allowed to ripen further before being picked, while still having a longer shelf life than it currently has. Because really, there's not much you can do to more effectively kill the flavor of fruit than picking it before it's ripe - and that's sadly the normal practice for most fruit today.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
My wife learned long ago to extend the shelf life of apples, oranges, grapes, lettuce, and other fruits and vegetables by letting them soak for 5-10 minutes in a solution of one cup of white vinegar to a gallon of tap water. She leaves the stems on. Then she rinses them off and put them in the refrigerator crisper.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Take India. Its population has almost doubled within the past few decades, even though its education level, affluence, urbanization, food, and everything else has approached modern first-world norms.
This is not true at all. You have obviously never been to India, or maybe just a 5-star hotel in Mumbai. Go visit a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, and you will never again believe that India "has approached first-world norms". India is poorer than Nigeria. Per capita GDP is a quarter that of China.
Your premise that affluence doesn't matter in India is also wrong. Middle class Indians reproduce at below replacement levels. The surplus births are coming from the rural poor.
What you do not smell is called Iocaine powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons known to man.
In 1950, India's population was 359 million.
In 1978, it was approximately 665 million.
As of this year, it's approximately 1.3 billion.
So, India's population almost doubled between 1950 and 1978, and literally doubled between 1978 and the present.
Rural-vs-Urban is a whacked-out mess pretty much EVERYWHERE, including the US.
The truth is, the postwar baby boom, and the much smaller generation that came before it, both had their origins in the Influenza Pandemic and Great Depression. After the pandemic, American families no longer had confidence that their kids would all live to reach adulthood, and the birthrate went off the scale for YEARS. The kids who were part of the large generation born between the Pandemic and Great Depression went on to be the parents of the Baby Boom generation. The kids who were part of the much, much smaller generation born during the Great Depression and World War II went on to be the parents of GenX. Baby Boomers heard the horror stories of being in a large impoverished family during the Great Depression from their parents, had birth control readily available for the first time, and made full use of it to keep their own family sizes down to approximately 2 kids. GenX kids grew up with parents who were a part of comparatively SMALL families, dismissed the stories of their grandparents' poverty as irrelevant, and took things like birth control for granted. Millennials were a generational tidal wave not because Boomers had huge families, but just because there were so freakin' many of them to begin with. The as-yet-unnamed-GenZ kids started out as a small generation due to GenX being small... but ended up suddenly growing by 25-50% in the metaphorical "ninth inning" due to late-life accidental pregnancies.
IMHO, the last-minute increase in the size of GenZ probably isn't an entirely bad thing. With GreatestGeneration->LostGeneration->Boomer->GenX->Millennial, we set ourselves up for an eternal demographic tsunami every 15-20 years, only to have things like newly-enlarged school districts see their populations collapse during the following 15-20 years before repeating the cycle all over again. Now, the size difference between alternating generations has been muted a bit, so that hopefully, going forward, things like populations of school kids will be more constant over time. GenX had way more kids than predicted, but Millennials and everyone coming later will probably have way fewer kids than models originally predicted due mainly to the constantly increasing age at which women have their first child.
At some point, we'll probably have a future blip when women in their 20s start routinely freezing eggs so they can pay a surrogate to carry children for them when they themselves are well into their 50s... but that won't have quite as much net impact as past blips, because the women who'll be getting paid to CARRY those children will be women who would have otherwise probably had kids of their own (ultimately, reducing the total number of babies born per year, even if individual women start having more babies than ever).
They should also invest into something that makes the fruit/veggies cheaper to grow. It's ridiculous when good quality apples or salad mix cost the same (or more!) as pork or chicken breast. In the case of apples, I'm sure it's not because they go bad quickly, if the retailer was worried about that they'd reduce the price to move inventory.
Lower your fridge temperature (but not too close to freezing) and add an ozone generator to the inside of your fridge and most everything in it will last longer. The ozone generator only needs to send out a pulse of ozone occasionally so it can run on batteries. There are a lot of them for sale on eBay. Seems like a better solution than modifying the vegetables.