A few years ago, if you walked down the produce aisle in any major supermarket in the U.S., you might have seen a sticker on avocados or lemons that said “Apeel.” The label wasn’t from a grower, but from a company designed to fight food waste; by adding a food-safe, plant-based coating to the fruit, it’s possible to make it last days longer, so it’s less likely to end up in the trash.
Apeel Sciences was quickly growing, and had already become one of the first food waste companies to reach unicorn status. (It made Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies list in 2019.) Grocers were touting the fact that they were using the product to reduce waste. The startup raised more than $800 million by 2022.
But then the company found itself at the center of an online disinformation campaign amplified by wellness influencers, leaving it struggling to survive. Social media posts claimed, falsely, that it wasn’t safe to eat fruit with Apeel—and linked to the ingredients of an unrelated floor cleaner that also happened to be named Apeel. Consumers started pressuring both grocery stores and growers to stop using the product. Retailers caved. The company’s business crashed. The story shows how easily a promising product can be derailed, and what it takes for a company to begin to recover.
The rise of a food waste unicorn
The research behind Apeel began in 2011, the brainchild of a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was searching for ways to fight global hunger. “The vision was, if we’re already growing enough food to feed everyone, the problem isn’t that we need to grow more food,” says James Rogers, the founder. “The problem is that we need to get the food to the people who need it.”
Working in his garage, Rogers started to develop the product, using ingredients found in seeds, pulp, and peels of other food, such as grape skins. “The company mimics the coating that’s on the surface of all fruits and vegetables, and by strengthening that coating—that layer of lipids—we are protecting the produce,” he says. Adding the coating slows down the process by which fruit loses moisture and oxidizes. The plant-based ingredients are edible, though consumers can wash them off.
With a grant from the Gates Foundation, Rogers and other researchers from his PhD program started working on the product, with the aim of helping farmers in Africa and Asia, where unrefrigerated fruit often goes bad before it can reach consumers. But he knew that it could be helpful more broadly, including in the U.S., where 60 million tons of food is wasted each year.
In 2016, the FDA gave the product a GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) designation, meaning that the agency had reviewed the ingredients and didn’t have any questions about the safety. When Apeel started approaching grocery stores, making the pitch that requiring suppliers to coat fruit would help with both environmental goals and reducing costs, the stores didn’t question whether consumers would want the coating.
After all, it’s common for produce to be coated—typically with wax that makes apples or oranges look shiny. Fungicides, a form of pesticide, are also used to slow the growth of mold. Those chemicals, including one called imazalil, are known endocrine disruptors. “We were asking them to advertise the products as Apeel so shoppers would know the benefits,” Rogers says. “But they said, ‘If we advertise some of our produce as Apeel and other produce without Apeel, the question that arises is, what’s on the other stuff?’”
Motivated by the potential to cut food waste, retailers moved forward. The product has other benefits: Fruit can be picked later, for example, potentially improving the flavor. Produce that might typically be wrapped in plastic, like a cucumber, could avoid single-use packaging.
In 2018, Kroger started working with some suppliers to pilot Apeel-coated avocados at some stores. By 2019, it had expanded the program nationwide. As more suppliers used it, Apeel started to show up at other stores, from Costco to Whole Foods. By 2023, it was in thousands of stores in the U.S. The company had also started working in Europe, where one German supermarket chain said that it was able to cut avocado waste in half because of the coating.
A sudden attack
The social media attacks started in the spring of 2023. First, two Facebook posts warned people not to eat anything coated with Apeel, linking to the floor cleaner. Similar posts followed on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. In total, there were 25 posts across different platforms at roughly the same time. “We know it wasn’t random,” Rogers says. “And we have done the forensics to see the coordination of the posts and the amplification to know that it wasn’t just a case of people that were mistaken. It was much deeper than that.”
The company still doesn’t know who was behind it. But the posts quickly spread and were shared by wellness influencers like Robyn Openshaw, also known as GreenSmoothieGirl. Some of the posts claimed that Bill Gates was using Apeel to put “dangerous chemicals” on fruit. (Gates, the subject of a long line of conspiracy theories, never invested in Apeel and never had any connection to the company beyond the fact that the Gates Foundation gave early grants for its work in the developing world.)
Influencers called for boycotts, and retailers and produce suppliers started getting harassing calls after their phone numbers were posted online. Instead of trying to defend the product, retailers decided to pull back. “Retailers were caught a little bit off guard, and they quickly chose to retreat a little bit,” says Luiz Beling, who joined as CEO in 2024 as Apeel was reeling from the attacks.
There was an added challenge. Initially, the company had focused on selling to retailers, who then required their suppliers to add the coating. Suppliers weren’t happy with the first version of the product, which was hard to incorporate into packing houses and an added expense. (In theory, it’s possible to imagine that a disgruntled supplier could have started the chain of disinformation.)
“Suppliers weren’t really happy because it was an intrusion into their operations,” Beling says. “It required equipment and changes to their packing houses. So they never really liked us that much. They complained to retailers, hey, I’m doing this because you want it, but it is a real pain to work with Apeel. When the disinformation came, I think we didn’t see the same reaction of retailers saying, hey, I’m going to stand up for science and explain.”
Sales dropped so steeply that the company had to lay off dozens of people, going from around 250 employees when the disinformation started to around 50 today. Since the attacks, part of the company’s focus has been rolling out a new system that’s cheap and can be used in existing equipment, so suppliers can immediately start seeing the benefits.
A scramble to react
When the attacks began, the company didn’t realize at first how far they would go. “One of the key learnings that I take away is you have to engage immediately,” says Beling. “I think for a period of time at Apeel, we were a bit naive—full of scientists that just came to the company to solve a major problem of cutting food waste and reducing hunger and reduced costs. We just couldn’t believe that these attacks were real. So initially we ignored it. It didn’t go away. We then responded with a lot of scientific data that frankly went over people’s heads.”
The company didn’t want to reveal proprietary details about its ingredients, but eventually went into more detail. “Another key learning is you don’t wait,” Beling says. “You engage very openly. You open up your books, especially when you’ve got nothing to hide.” The ingredients, plant-based oils called purified monoglycerides and diglycerides, are all edible and found in food, from fruit to breast milk.
Beling and Rogers started engaging on Instagram and X, giving out their mobile numbers and inviting skeptics to visit the company. They also focused on understanding the underlying motivation—people have legitimate concerns about additives in food in general—and tried to respond in ways that were understandable for laypeople, not technical. To some extent, the outreach worked. “When we put a face to the company and we open up and we actually answer genuine questions, we turn them from detractors to advocates,” says Beling. “We actually have probably, I would say, 20 folks online today that if you go back to ’23 or ’24 they were detractors, where they now they defend us.”
Some people publicly apologized, like Michelle Pfeiffer, who’d initially said on Instagram that organic produce was “no longer safe” because of Apeel, copying other claims. The company contacted her, and three weeks later, she posted again, saying that she’d “unintentionally posted inaccurate and outdated information” and was sorry for that.
Some corrections were forced: Last year, Apeel sued Openshaw, aka GreenSmoothieGirl, after she made dozens of posts about the company, including claims that the coating used chemicals found in gasoline. As part of a settlement, she apologized, admitting that there had been “a lot of confusion” about the product and “quite a bit of it is not true.”
Still, the damage was done. False claims about Apeel are still abundant online. Sales in the U.S. were decimated; the company’s avocado volume has dropped by 99% from its peak.
Surviving disinformation
Though disinformation also made it to Europe, retailers there resisted it. “I think the difference there was we had strong support from the retailers from the beginning where they were very comfortable articulating why they were using Apeel,” Beling says. The European Union has stronger goals to reduce food waste. Retailers there also saw clear benefits of fresher produce—avocados shipped from South America, for example, are now much more likely to survive the trip to consumers. Social media posts may have also been slower to spread because platforms in the EU are more regulated, and are legally required to take down defamatory posts after getting notice.
Around 70% of the company’s sales are now in Europe, and those international sales helped the company survive. Earlier, 70% of sales were in the U.S. “This was one of the strangest experiences that I’ve ever had—to watch what was happening in the country I grew up in, the country I live in, and to see that business being destroyed,” says Rogers, the founder. “And at the same time, you see our products growing and taking off in other countries.”
After Apeel’s pivot to make the coating easier for suppliers to use, and to sell directly to suppliers, some of those companies are also now selling more Apeel-coated produce in U.S. stores. But unlike Europe, there’s no sticker mentioning the product.
Retailers, for now, don’t want to market the fact that it’s there. “We respect their decision because, again, they were ultimately targeted as well,” says Beling. “Some of them were dragged into it, they got threatened. . . . So they’re a little bit like, ‘I know it’s safe. I know it’s a better product. I’m going to use it. I’m going to ask my suppliers to use it. But I’m not going to market just yet because we’re still a little bit concerned of what this attack has been on you guys.’”
Kroger said in a statement that it had “put a great deal of effort into making Apeel a point of differentiation with our customers,” when the collaboration began in 2017. “Despite these efforts, the program did not resonate with our customers,” Kroger said. The company said that it is no longer working with Apeel, but didn’t respond when asked if it was selling produce from suppliers who now use the coating on their own.
“By and large, most retailers have come to us and said, ‘I have no problem with your product—I am very comfortable letting suppliers use it,’” Beling says. “And there are some retailers, very few, but there are some retailers saying, you know, ‘Let’s wait a little longer, let’s really wait till this noise completely dies down. I don’t have a problem with the safety of your problem, I just had a problem with with with some consumers asking about it.’ And so they were slowly warming up.”
