After a viral online misinformation campaign nearly wiped out its domestic retail presence, Apeel Sciences is staging a strategic U.S. comeback. Anchored by a strong international business, the food-tech innovator has expanded beyond its original plant-based, shelf-life extending coatings into advanced supply chain digitization, using a broader toolset and a renewed sense of purpose to reclaim its home market.
Leading that deliberate return, Apeel Sciences CEO Luiz Beling is speaking out about the broader threat facing agricultural technology. He warns that the smear campaign targeting his company was not an isolated incident, but a symptom of a far more dangerous anti-tech push that threatens the future of global food security and supply chain efficiency.
“There’s a movement against innovation in the United States, and I think it’s really important for companies to come out, be open about what they’re doing in their business and engage more openly about it,” Beling told The Packer.
While the origins of the anti-innovation push remain complex, Beling thinks the coordinated efforts to stall progress may stem from a mix of protectionist interests, bad-actor influencers capitalizing on public fear, and broader geopolitical forces looking to undercut American leadership in agriculture.
However, Beling notes the disinformation campaign against Apeel that began in 2023 came from domestic soil rather than abroad. “By and large, the attack on [Apeel] was in the United States — it wasn’t coming from outside of the United States,” he says.
After years of lawsuits and legislative hurdles, the company has since emerged from that crucible fundamentally reshaped. Moving beyond its original focus as a single-solution startup in coatings, Apeel has evolved into an integrated food-tech partner committed to building a smarter food system by marrying produce preservation and intelligence.
“We’re a completely new company than we were about a year ago,” says Beling. “We’re a food-tech company combining plant-based protection with AI and real-time data to help improve the decisions digitized from the farm all the way to the table.”
From Retail Partner to Supply Chain Engine
Central to Apeel’s operational reset is a fundamental shift in its target customer, moving focus away from retail shelves and directly to the start of the supply chain.
“We transformed our company to be more food tech, but most importantly, a supply chain player. We are not a retail player anymore,” Beling says. “We are starting with growers and packers to understand their pain points first... Now suppliers and growers are our main customers, helping the retailers be more successful.”
To support this new supply-chain-first approach, Apeel overhauled its application technology to make it far simpler and vastly more economical. Instead of requiring proprietary machinery and facility modifications, the company redesigned its coatings to run on suppliers’ existing equipment — an operational breakthrough that unlocked significant cost savings.
“We now seamlessly integrate in the supply chain,” Beling explains. “That allowed our costs to reduce tenfold. We used to charge about $2 a box of fruit. We now charge 20 cents a box of fruit. That drives a lot more adoption because suppliers can see the value and they can afford the technology.”
The second major evolution in Apeel’s strategy is the integration of an intelligence layer to assess crop quality before produce ever hits the packing house. By deploying a suite of hardware and software tools, the company digitizes quality control, capturing both external attributes like fruit size and disease development alongside internal metrics like dry matter, Brix levels and acidity.
“By digitizing the experience, we help farmers and packers make better decisions on what to do with their crop,” says Beling. “When do you harvest? When do you deploy labor? When do you bring that crop into your packing houses? To which customers do you channel that crop?”
Already deployed in avocados, citrus and stone fruit in key global markets, Apeel’s intelligence stack ensures produce is preserved — or redirected — at precisely the right moment, Beling says.
That expanded capability unlocks direct financial gains for suppliers.
In the case of citrus, by developing specialized formulations tailored for long-term storage, Apeel offers solutions that allow growers to store fruit longer without losing mass, color or juice quality, allowing them to time the market and capitalize on higher price windows.
“Once we moved to suppliers, we felt like we needed to expand our portfolio because customers had different needs,” Beling says. “Some suppliers want to extend their season... so they can compete more effectively at the part of the season when prices are better.”
Beling saw the concrete economic upside firsthand during a recent visit to a California citrus operation. Without long-term storage technology, lemons must be offloaded quickly for processing at around $2 a carton. But by preserving freshness across an extended storage window, growers can command premium fresh-market pricing.
“If they have a storage program that maintains mass, color and the quality of the fruit for 60 to 90 days, they can then sell that [lemon] for $16 a carton,” says Beling. “It’s real economics... We earn people’s business because they have a pain point, and there’s an economic value, and then there’s also the sustainability message.”
Beling says Apeel also sees customers wanting to ship more internationally and long haul, which means its products needed to have a stronger performance to last weeks, if not months, in shipment and still maintain quality.
“We have transformed ourselves from being just a startup in coatings to something bigger than that,” Beling explains, noting that the ultimate goal is building a smarter, more affordable food system that encourages healthy eating. “We want to be part of driving more consumption of fresh produce and less processed foods. And we believe the combination of extension of shelf life, working with suppliers, and intelligence is what can get us there.”
Avocado Advantages
Evaluating crop quality on an avocado farm has traditionally been an inefficient, manual process — requiring workers to harvest samples in the field, destroy produce for lab testing, and wait days for paper-based data to be recorded. Digitization is changing that equation by replacing destructive testing with instant, non-invasive scanning that captures visual and internal metrics like size, dry matter, says Beling. By automatically uploading real-time data directly to decision-makers, growers can test significantly more samples with far less labor.
This technology optimizes harvest timing by replacing guesswork with precise dry-matter readings — the primary metric used to determine fruit maturity. Instead of wasting resources on unready crops, growers can pinpoint the exact blocks and trees ready for harvest, ensuring crews are deployed with maximum efficiency.
Beling emphasizes that this capability provides a vital edge for growers: “Given that labor is such a pain point for the industry in general, but especially in the U.S., this is a fantastic technology that allows them to be faster, less labor-intensive, less destructive, and more importantly, have the information more readily available to make decisions.”
The technology also streamlines cross-border supply chains for avocados shipped to the U.S. from Mexico and Colombia. By enabling growers to assess quality and bag fruit for the final customer directly at origin, Apeel eliminates the costly, labor-heavy step of repacking and rebagging stateside.
Global Perspective and Regulatory Shifts
Apeel maintains that its products are among the safest and most thoroughly evaluated solutions available. Derived from mono- and diglycerides — naturally occurring plant fats found in edible peels, seeds and pulp — its plant-based protection provides a clean-label solution.
Beling says that safety profile is validated by Apeel’s rapid international expansion, particularly across European markets subject to far stricter regulatory standards than the U.S. Free from the intense domestic smear campaigns that disrupted its American operations, Apeel’s overseas business has grown to account for roughly 70% of company revenue.
“For us to not only have gone through a rigorous process in Europe, but actually have our product be certified vegan in Europe — that’s how strong of an endorsement we have from European authorities — is a testament that the product is really safe,” he says.
And as the FDA and global regulators increasingly target petroleum-based plastics, microplastics and harsh fungicides, Beling foresees an inevitable shift in how U.S. produce is protected.
“I think it’s a matter of time,” Beling says. “I do believe the administration has declared their long-term goal. The government may start putting restrictions, and then suddenly now you have to be reactive. So, let’s be proactive. Let’s find solutions. Let’s start preparing for the new supply chain of the future, while you still have these other options in place.”
Protecting “Narrative Security” and Other Lessons Learned
For Apeel Sciences, navigating a barrage of online rumors revealed that technological integrity alone isn’t enough to protect a company from public backlash. The company acknowledges that its initial approach was overly scientific, assuming shoppers instinctively understood that produce is routinely treated post-harvest.
“We were a lot of young scientists with a big mission... and to some degree, we were naive when we were attacked,” Beling reflects. “We were engaging very scientifically, and that’s good for some... [but] we got pushback from the consumer audience, so we needed to learn how to engage.”
That realization forced Apeel to prioritize public transparency, regulatory dialogue, and proactive consumer communication alongside its technical R&D. Instead of shying away from government scrutiny, the company actively supported legislative transparency efforts like the Apeel Reveal Act and expanded its engagement with federal agencies.
“We leaned in and said, ‘Yep, we are for transparency. We are for more scrutiny because we feel good about what we’ve built,’” Beling says, noting that openly sharing its process is essential to rebuilding trust with U.S. authorities and shoppers alike.
Apeel also invited retailers, suppliers, consumers and industry partners directly into its offices to see the technology firsthand. This hands-on access humanized the team behind the science, showing visitors that the company is made up of everyday people — moms and dads who worry about what goes into their own families’ food and are actively working to create safer solutions, he says.
For other innovators in agricultural technology, Beling offers a crucial warning: safeguarding your company’s story is just as vital as protecting its intellectual property. In an era where misinformation can instantly derail years of progress, brand communication cannot be an afterthought.
“In this world of tech, there’s a lot of discussion about cybersecurity... [but] an area that I think we’ve learned a lot about is your narrative security,” Beling says. “You have to make sure you communicate openly what you’re trying to do, and not just with the industry, but primarily with consumers... You have to be very open, and you have to recognize that that part of your strategy is just as important as building your markets.”
And when under attack from bad actors spreading false information, Beling says companies shouldn’t hesitate to take decisive legal action. Taking an aggressive stance deters those looking for a quick profit and forces critics to defend their claims.
“What we learned quickly is that [suing somebody] deterred a lot of people... people now had to defend their claims against us, and they couldn’t hold their claims,” he says.
While litigation can be costly and intimidating, Beling says waiting too long to fight back only allows misinformation to take root. “I wish we would have done [it] a lot sooner because we went probably two years just taking the beatings and not really pushing back,” he says. It was only after combining open dialogue with legal deterrence that Apeel was finally able to “regain the narrative.”
Regaining a U.S. Foothold
Apeel Sciences’ strategy to rebuild its U.S. presence relies on a two-pronged approach: retail education and deep supplier integration. The initial phase focused on repairing retail relationships by directly countering a misinformation campaign that had damaged brand trust. By equipping buyers with factual data to address consumer hesitancy, Apeel eliminated key barriers to entry.
“That work has been done to the point that there’s not many retailers out there that wouldn’t accept Apeel anymore,” Beling says. “We basically lifted pretty much all the restrictions that existed.”
With those retail hurdles cleared, the second phase re-engages growers and packers as core clients rather than secondary intermediaries.
“We now have shifted to say, ‘You are our customers,’” Beling explains. “We never really engaged deeply with you... We now need to really understand your business and understand your challenges, and then across our tech stack, can we solve some of those?”
While the domestic client base is still recovering — accounting for roughly 10% of Apeel’s current global customer accounts — this supplier-centric approach is gaining quick traction.
“The conversations are very productive because we now are understanding their business, and through that, we’re bringing solutions that add value,” Beling says.
Apeel Sciences is preparing to reconnect directly with domestic produce leaders at major upcoming trade events, including the IFPA Global Produce and Floral Show in October and The Avocado Conference in November. The appearances mark an intentional return to the U.S. market.
“It was like we took a pause in the U.S.,” Beling says. “We needed to go through everything to fight this misinformation and get our business model better aligned. We’re now ready to reengage the U.S. market. To me, the opportunity is to have the industry bring us their biggest challenges and work together to see how our technology — between digitization and preservation — can help solve their pain points.”
