2019 has been a year of growth for Apeel Sciences. Our business has expanded in size, with new offices in Mexico, Peru, and The Netherlands. Our product offerings have grown beyond avocados, with the launch of limes and organic apples, as well as the announcement of plastic-free cucumbers. We shared news of our national expansion with Kroger, and we announced new partners, including Nature’s Pride, Edeka, Salling Group, and Houweling’s (to name a few). If you’ve been following us, you have probably seen that the Apeel Team has also grown this year. We have twice as many people as we did this time last year!
While this kind of growth offers a signal that we’re headed in an exciting direction, growth is not the only way we measure ourselves at Apeel. It’s not only if we’ve grown, but how we’ve grown that really matters. Apeel strives to develop innovations that solve challenges, from food waste to plastic overuse, in a way that will be sustainable with the needs of the future. Introducing a product that can help solve the food waste crisis is part of this story, but it’s way more than that. It’s about building sustainability into everything we do, from designing our products to operating our facilities to supporting our partners. It’s not an initiative or a set of goals, it’s our mission and strategy at Apeel, and we use data and science to measure whether we’re on track.
In 2019, we hinted at some of the progress we’ve made. We announced that Apeel has reduced avocado waste with our retail partners in their stores by up to 50% and that our new partnership with Houweling’s will eliminate 60,000 pounds of plastic shrink wrap from their cucumbers each year starting in 2020 (that’s equal to 85 million plastic straws!). We’ve also wrote about how we’ve used the Food Waste Hierarchy to develop donation programs with the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County and a vermicomposting partnership with Orella Ranch. But we’re just getting started.
In 2020, we’re going to start pulling back the curtain. With almost two years of data and analysis under our belts, we’re ready to start sharing how far we’ve come, the positive impacts we’ve created, and the methods we use to track the sustainability of our products. In the fight against food waste, we are only one piece of the solution, so we’ll be asking for your help towards the greater goal! Your actions and insights can and will help us design better products that have larger sustainability benefits now and into the future.
Happy New Year!
- The Apeel Team
Do you want to get involved with Apeel in 2020? Get in touch with our team and we’ll get back to you soon!
