The startup that tried to fix food waste—and got hit by a disinformation campaign

Apeel Sciences, a company founded to combat food waste by applying a plant-based coating to produce, faced a significant downturn due to a disinformation campaign. This campaign, amplified by wellness influencers on social media, falsely claimed that Apeel-coated fruits were unsafe to eat and linked the product to unrelated industrial chemicals. The company, which achieved unicorn status and had raised over $800 million by 2022, saw its business collapse as retailers and growers succumbed to consumer pressure and stopped using its product. The research for Apeel began in 2011 with founder James Rogers, then a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, aiming to address food distribution challenges rather than production shortages. Rogers developed the coating using ingredients derived from food byproducts like grape skins, mimicking natural fruit coatings. Despite its initial success, including recognition on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list in 2019, the online misinformation campaign severely impacted Apeel's operations, highlighting the vulnerability of innovative products to coordinated online attacks. The company is now working to recover from this crisis.