Ryp Labs CEO and co-founder Moody Soliman didn’t necessarily intend to start out in the fresh produce industry, but after working in medical devices, he encountered sticker technology that could extend the shelf life of fresh produce.
“I’ve always worked on technologies that can impact people’s lives,” he says, adding that he then turned his focus to food waste. “We started to realize that this is just a massive problem.”
That challenge is one on a huge scale, according to Soliman, who says every minute people waste enough food to feed more than 1 million people and release tons of greenhouse gases.
“It’s environmental, social and economic, and it’s experienced all across the supply chain from the farm all the way down to the consumer,” he says.
And that’s around the time he and his co-founder came across technology, created by a young entrepreneur from Malaysia, that extended fresh produce shelf life.
“We figured out that if it’s going to be an impactful solution that’s really going to make a difference, it has to be very easy to use, can be applied anywhere along the supply chain, scalable, and very importantly, can be adopted by the largest distributors and packers in the world down to the smallest smallholder farmer,” Soliman says.
What Does Ryp Labs Do?
Ryp’s main product is StixFresh, which is a food-safe sticker coated with 100% natural food-grade bioactive formulation that inhibits fungal growth. It’s also OMRI listed in the U.S.
“You can apply our sticker to the fruit, or to a package of the fruit, and it releases those natural bioactive and can extend the shelf life anywhere from 40% to 100%, depending, of course, on the use case conditions,” Soliman says.
He explains there are essentially three ways that produce decomposes: through oxidation and dehydration; through the production of ethylene; and through pathological and microbial damage.
“Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve taken how plants have been defending themselves for millions of years and we’ve repurposed it to now extend the shelf life of fresh produce,” he says. “We just inhibit the fungal growth in the vapor phase.”
Soliman says an important part of what Ryp Labs has introduced is that its technology is easy to integrate into the supply chain. Ryp’s formulation is applied to the surface of a standard PLU sticker.
“One of the challenges that we saw and learned from earlier on is if you’re adding anything into the supply chain, it’s going to hinder the adoption of the technology,” he says.
Ryp Labs also has sachets with the same bioactive formulation.
Soliman says the company uses volume-based pricing for its technology.
“As we get higher and higher volumes, we can bring the cost down considerably,” he says. “Today, we estimate that based on their losses, if we’re talking about a very high-value, short shelf-life produce, they can see up to 300% ROI. For every dollar they’re spending on the technology, they can get $3 back.”
Where the Future May Lead
Soliman says one goal is to get to a scale to bring costs down to a place where it is a fit with more produce commodities.
“Our ultimate goal is that this technology becomes readily available and becomes an industry standard,” he says. “Of course, it’s a huge challenge, especially in this industry. We, you know, learn sometimes the hard way of how risk-averse people are and how conservative they are and slow they are to adoption, but we’re definitely making our way there.”
Latin and South America and Southeast Asia have been very interested in Ryp’s technology, Soliman says.
“When you go down to South America and Latin America, they want to ship their produce further, longer distances into the U.S. and into Europe, and that’s where they see a lot of breaks in the cold chain and a lot of issues happening, and that’s where they can get higher prices for their produce, so they’re a lot more excited about something new,” he says.
While Soliman says it’s been harder to get into Japan, he sees strong potential for strawberries.
“That’s why Japan is actually an ideal customer for us, because of very expensive, high-end strawberries; they pick them so they don’t sacrifice the quality, but then it means it goes bad a lot quicker,” he says.
Soliman says he also sees potential for packaging to contain the bioactive materials as well.
“It’s going to take time, but eventually we want to get to the point where that customer, [with] the box they’ve been buying off the shelf for the last 20 years, they can just now pick one up and the box itself is going to keep their produce fresh,” he says.
