Apeel's Grape Seed Coating Once Kept Six in Ten American Supermarket Avocados From Spoiling. Then the Internet Found the Safety Data Sheet for a British Degreaser Also Called Apeel.
Apeel Sciences began in 2012 with a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, awarded to a materials scientist named James Rogers to reduce the amount of food that rots between the farm and the plate in countries without reliable refrigeration. A second grant of about $1 million followed in 2015. The idea was to give fruit a second skin: a thin, invisible coating of mono- and diglycerides, fats extracted from grape seeds, applied after harvest to slow the loss of moisture and the arrival of oxygen. The coating was sold as a powder, mixed with water, and the FDA treated it as Generally Recognized as Safe in 2016. Mono- and diglycerides are also an approved food additive in Europe, where they are known as E471 and appear in a great deal of bread.
Fruit that loses water more slowly goes off more slowly, and fruit that goes off more slowly is thrown away less. Retailers liked the arithmetic. By 2021 Apeel had about 450 employees, had raised some $640 million from backers that included Temasek and Katy Perry, and was valued at more than $2 billion. At its peak, by Rogers's own count, 60 percent of the avocados in American grocery stores carried the coating. He now puts that figure at zero.
The Safety Data Sheet
In April 2023 a document began to circulate on Instagram and TikTok as proof that Apeel was poison. It was a safety data sheet listing hazard warnings for eye damage and allergic skin reactions, under the name Apeel. It was genuine. It belonged to Evans Apeel, an orange-scented hard-surface cleaner and degreaser made by Evans Vanodine, a cleaning-products company in Lancashire. The Associated Press, Lead Stories, AFP and Full Fact each traced it to the degreaser, and Evans Vanodine added a notice to its own product page, in capitals, stating that its cleaner had no relation to Apeel Sciences and should not be used to preserve fruits and vegetables.
The correction travelled less well than the document. Posts that followed claimed the coating was laced with heavy metals, solvents and glyphosate, and that it had been invented by Bill Gates. Gates owns no part of the company. The heavy-metal claim came from Apeel's own 2019 filing with the FDA, which reported tests of its grape seed oil for lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury and found them within FDA limits. The solvent claim came from the same filing, which described washing the glycerides with heptane or ethyl acetate during manufacture. Apeel says it has since switched to distillation and uses no solvents at all. The disclosures that regulators require so that the public can check a product became the public's evidence against it.
The Other 99.34 Percent
The most durable exhibit was a pesticide label. To sell a version of its coating to organic growers, Apeel registered a product called Organipeel with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 as a post-harvest fungicide, because its active ingredient, citric acid, inhibits mould. The label listed that ingredient as 0.66 percent of the product and the remaining 99.34 percent as "other ingredients," the standard wording for inert components a manufacturer treats as proprietary. Public FDA documents indicate that the 99.34 percent is largely the same monoglycerides. On social media it became the 99.34 percent that Apeel would not name.
Natural Grocers, a chain of more than 160 stores, told its suppliers in 2023 that it would not accept produce treated with any Apeel coating. "This is not something that we want in our food supply," its vice president of regulatory affairs told Organic Insider. Organipeel had first been offered in 2017. It has not been commercially available since 2023.
The Shoppers' Guide
The campaign generated its own merchandise. Robyn Openshaw, a wellness author who publishes as Green Smoothie Girl, posted at least 60 times between July 2023 and May 2025 about Apeel, according to the lawsuit the company later filed, urging followers to boycott treated produce and to press Costco and the berry supplier Driscoll's to stop using it. She also sold a downloadable wallet card listing the stores that did not carry Apeel. In July 2025 the actor Michelle Pfeiffer told her Instagram followers that organic produce was no longer safe because Apeel had won organic approval, and listed the stores that refused it. Three weeks later she posted that the information had been inaccurate and outdated, and that Organipeel had not been on sale for two years.
The same month, Representative Marlin Stutzman of Indiana introduced H.R. 4737, the Apeel Reveal Act, which would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to require labels disclosing the coating on fruit and vegetables. "Applying chemical concoctions to fruits and vegetables without telling American consumers is unacceptable," he said. Apeel replied that it complied with existing labelling law and that its ingredients had been listed on its website for years.
The Ledger
The company's troubles did not all come from the internet. Apeel cut staff twice in 2022, before the first safety data sheet was posted, citing economic headwinds it had underestimated, and Rogers has acknowledged as much. But the losses it attributes to the campaign are specific. Costco dropped the coating. Limoneira backed out of a deal. Walmart and Kroger, both prospective customers, did not proceed. Calavo Growers was asked by its retail customers to stop using Apeel-treated fruit. The company says it lost more than 15 retail customers and over $60 million in expected revenue, and it sued Openshaw for defamation, trade libel and false advertising in federal court in Florida in August 2025. "When we first started getting attacked, we thought people were confused," Rogers told AgFunderNews.
The case was closed on 4 May 2026. Openshaw agreed to pay an undisclosed sum and to apologise. Alison Steinberg, a former One America News host who had told viewers about the heptane, had apologised the previous October, as had the brands The Carnivore Bar, Leefy Organics and Mangones. Apeel now employs about 50 people, and roughly 70 percent of its business is in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where retailers kept buying the coating throughout.
The Apeel Reveal Act would require a label on every piece of American produce treated with Apeel. By its founder's count, that is currently none of the avocados.
Filed from public reporting:
- AgFunderNews — "Apeel founder on MAHA, misinformation, layoffs, and a second act in post-harvest tech"
- FreshPlaza / Fast Company — "U.S. produce coating company recovers after misinformation claims"
- Associated Press — Fact check on the Apeel safety data sheet
- Lead Stories — "Fact Check: Apeel Produce Coating Does NOT Have 'Long List Of Hazardous Cautions'"
- Science Feedback — "Edible food coating Apeel doesn't contain toxic ingredients"
- Organic Insider — "Organipeel, Apeel controversy: key takeaways"
- Parade via AOL — "Michelle Pfeiffer Apologizes After Sharing Misinformation About Bill Gates and Apeel"
- Fresh Fruit Portal — "Apeel Sciences responds to Federal Labeling Bill"
- The Spoon — "Apeel Sues Online Influencer In Latest Effort to Stem Tide of Misinfo About Produce Life Extension Tech"
- PacerMonitor — Apeel Technology, Inc. v. Openshaw et al (3:25-cv-01003), M.D. Fla.
- Santa Barbara Independent — "Apeel Lays Off 105 Employees"
