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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In marketing-speak, "chemical" means "synthetic chemical" as opposed to a wax extracted from an existing plant using only physical changes.
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.
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.
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).