How Edipeel combats food waste by doubling shelf life

Combating food waste can be done by recycling or composting. However, according to Futurism, a startup company in California called Apeel Sciences is using a third way to prevent food waste, which is extending the shelf-life of food so that it doesn’t spoil before it can be shipped.

Apeel Sciences has developed an edible coating called Edipeel, made from compounds and fats derived from fruits and vegetables. Perishable food is then covered with the substance, which protects it from spoilage in two ways. First, it prevents the water in the food from evaporating. Second, it stops oxygen, and presumably the bacteria it contains, from reacting with the food. Edipeel is said to double the shelf-life of food coated with it.

The FDA has already hastened the approval of Edipeel by designating it as “generally recognized as safe.” Edipeel-coated avocados, a food prone to spoilage, are already being sold in American supermarkets such as Costco and Kroger. The company is exploring citrus fruit protected by its product, especially for the developing world.

World hunger is caused not just be a shortage of food production, but inadequate transportation. In some parts of the world, food often spoils before it can get to the people who need it because of a lack of transportation infrastructure and too few refrigerated trucks and rail cars. A product such as Edipeel could solve two problems at once, food waste and hunger. The longer that perishable foods such as avocados and oranges can stay on the shelf without spoiling, the more likely they are to appear on someone’s dinner plate and not in a landfill producing nothing but methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.