From Idea to Product—Leveraging Materials to Reduce Food Waste

According to the United Nations - Food Agricultural Organization (UN-FAO), we will need 56% more food to feed the growing global population by 2050. In addition, with more than 800 million people who are affected by hunger today, we need solutions that can address food production and supply challenges in short order. One way to address these challenges is to reduce food waste and loss which is reported between 30 and 50% based on geography and product category by the UN-FAO. Beyond the challenge of continuing to feed a growing population, the environmental and economic impacts of food waste are staggering: 8% of greenhouse gas emissions globally and a total cost of $2.6 trillion dollars annually are due to food waste.<br/><br/>In this talk, we will address how Apeel Sciences, a start-up based in Santa Barbara, CA, is approaching tackling food waste and loss by developing new plant based technologies and products that 'work with nature'. The talk will review the process and the journey of an ‘idea’ to a product via a multidisciplinary approach inspired by Materials Science and Engineering principles to develop a plant based edible coating and other technologies utilizing data science and computer vision to make quantitative produce quality tools and shelf life prediction models to address food lo