When it comes to harvesting fruits and vegetables, food chemist Jenny Du knows that the clock starts ticking the second an orange is plucked from a tree. 

“It's like a ticking time bomb,” Jenny Du said on April 10, kicking off her TED Talk at the TED 2025 main stage in Vancouver, Canada. 

“It's literally this living and breathing thing that's slowly cannibalizing its own stores of energy and nutrients, just trying to stay alive until it ultimately gets eaten by microbes or some other animal like us.”

But not all produce rots the same — a sentiment that rings all too true for anyone who’s tried to buy and use a bag of spinach before it turns to wilted slime. 

“Strawberries last much longer than oranges, but have you ever wondered why that is and what could be done about it?” Du posed to the crowd. “My journey in trying to figure that out started in the spring of 2013.”

Du launched the audience back in time to her days studying chemistry at the University of Santa Barbara, California, when she was trying to put her schooling to “meaningful use.” 

“Two of my lab mates, James Rogers and Luis Perez, invite me to dinner, but it turns out to be a pitch disguised as dinner,” Du said. “They opened by totally flooring me with some staggering stats. The third of the food that we produce worldwide is lost or wasted before it ever has a chance to be eaten. For fresh fruits and vegetables, that number is a half.”

Du explained that waste exists in every step of food production, from the second an orange gets plucked from a tree to the transportation it requires when shipped to stores, the refrigeration used to keep it stable, and the fact that half of the oranges harvested end up never being eaten at all. 

“It’s not just a waste of the food,” Du said, “it’s a waste of the land, water, fertilizers, labor, energy, fuel, packaging, and money out of farmers' and our pockets. If global food waste was a country, it’d be the third highest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US.”

That’s when Du, Rogers, and Perez created Apeel Sciences in a humble garage. 

“We led first with some questions. How do plants protect themselves? Well, with peel. Plants, just like us, have a skin or peel, technically called the plant cuticle, and that helps to protect them from moisture loss, oxidation, and infection. What are those peels made of? Fatty acids, glycerides … these are ingredients found universally in all plants, in the peel, pulp, and seeds, and including in plants that we already eat.”

Going back to that original question of why strawberries last longer than oranges, Du explained that different fruits have different shelf lives because of the “thickness and arrangement” of their natural ingredients. 

“The idea then is, can we take these harmless edible plant-based ingredients, apply them in a thin layer on the surface of fresh fruits and vegetables to help reinforce the existing natural peel? If you do that, can you help to retain peak flavor, texture, and nutrients for longer without reliance on refrigeration, pesticides, waxes, or plastics?”

To test those questions, they partnered with a local farmer to source finger limes. 

“They’re literally finger-shaped, and when you cut them open, the pulp is in the shape of beets like caviar,” Du described. “They are delicious and they’re super fragrant.”

But once they’re picked, the organic limes dry out within seven days, even with refrigeration. 

“We took a test batch of material that we made using leftover tomato peels, since those are rich in these fatty acids and glycerides,” Du said. “We dipped those limes in a bowl of these ingredients in water and set them aside to dry. Then we waited. We saw that we could add an extra week of freshness to these limes.”

“When we saw that for the first time, we were like, ‘Shut the front door. Oh, my God, this might actually work!’” Du recalled. “We then went and wanted to apply this little bit of extra peel to all other kinds of fruits and vegetables. Bananas, avocados, limes, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumber, berries, you name it.”

That natural compound, which is one-tenth the size of a small raisin,  formed the basis for Apeel Science’s “Apeel-protected produce.”

“Even though these materials are, of course, edible, you can wash them off by just rubbing under running water,” Du said, later adding that the compound is neutral, with “no taste, no smell.”

Since Apeel Sciences was formed in 2021, the start-up has hit some astonishing milestones. 

“We've prevented 166 million pieces of produce from going to waste,” Du stated. “In doing that, that's avoided the emissions of more than 29,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to planting 485,000 trees, and saved almost seven billion liters of water, or enough to fill 2,800 Olympic-size swimming pools.”

The crowd erupted into applause. 

“We’re not a silver bullet to end food waste ourselves,” Du admitted. “But thankfully, there are lots of startups, scale-ups, organizations, and individuals all around the world working to transform this post-harvest space.”

“We’re optimistic that our one small innovation using common ingredients inspired by the ancient wisdom of plants is playing its part in having an impact, reinventing the food system, and helping it create abundance for it.”

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Header image: Jenny Du speaks at SESSION 9 at TED 2025: Humanity Reimagined. April 7-11, 2025, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Jason Redmond / TED