I think one of the more impossible feats of being human is living in the present while simultaneously existing in the future. Feel the ground beneath your feet, but don’t take your eyes off the horizon, right? While we try our best to balance this act as individuals, the beauty of a company is that it can be in two places—or many—at once. With a team of like-minded people backed by the same passion, dedication, and definition of success, a company can live with one foot firmly planted in the present while reading the tea leaves of the future.
Very well-informed tea leaves, that is.
Apeel Sciences takes this position—and guardianship—very seriously. With a new Chief Executive Officer, Luiz Beling, at the helm, the team has accepted its charge as one of the many elite technology companies standing as a harbinger of the future.
As a relatively small company with the potential to have a significant impact in the world, Luiz feels quite at home with the challenge. Bringing a background steeped in managing complex issues, he hopes his experience can accelerate growth and change for Apeel. An engineer by training with a love of solving puzzles, Luiz is steering Apeel’s growth to build a scalable business that impacts the world’s food systems and access to fresh food. Hailing from recent leadership roles at Farmer’s Business Network and Bayer Crop Science, Luiz has been characterized by his deep commitment to finding solutions to critical challenges across the ag industry, from packing houses to store shelves.
When given the chance to interview such a mind, you plant one foot firmly in the present as that individual helps you see the future.
Luiz Beling, Chief Executive Officer, Apeel Sciences: Thank you. It was wonderful to come to a company like Apeel and so completely align with the team’s vision and everything the operation stands for. From my perspective, Apeel’s vision revolves around three main areas: innovation, sustainability and our global impact, and reducing food waste while improving food security.
We are a science-based company, so innovation is extremely important for solving complex problems. Sustainability, our global impact, and the mission to reduce food waste and improve food security all work hand-in-hand under the umbrella of innovation. Each area fully aligns with my passion and how we approach customers every day.
LB: We aim to make Apeel into a global leader in sustainable agriculture and food preservation. The key to this goal is leveraging the technology we have today, plus the ones we’re developing in-house, and extending its reach to new markets and new categories. In this way, we can increase Apeel’s impact on the environment by reducing environmental impact and food waste.
To answer the question: How do we take the technology we are developing today and expand it into more markets, more categories, and up that global impact? Our response is through innovation. Not only from a technology perspective but by innovating with partnerships in the industry. In order for us to successfully innovate, it has to solve problems for customers. That customer has many different faces, from packing houses and retailers to foodservice operators. It is not only essential that we continue our research and development investments, but more importantly, work in partnership and cooperation with our customers to amplify the impact.
This wide-ranging network we are building will allow us to truly impact food waste globally and across categories.
LB: The team and I plan to improve the customer experience by focusing Apeel’s strategy on a few core areas.
The first area is to adopt that more customer-centric approach. Apeel started as a science-based company, and its teams spent a lot of time developing the science. We have to evolve from just building the science to solving real problems for customers by better understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points. We then gather continuous feedback and change how we implement the program.
“We aim to make Apeel into a global leader in sustainable agriculture and food preservation. The key to this goal is leveraging the technology we have today, plus the ones we’re developing in-house, and extending its reach to new markets and new categories. In this way, we can increase Apeel’s impact on the environment by reducing environmental impact and food waste.”
Luiz Beling, Chief Executive Officer, Apeel Sciences
Here is an example: When Apeel brought our product to market, one big hurdle was the installation process. Our teams had to go into a packing house to activate the facility for Apeel’s treatments. We’d put our own equipment on-site to be able to produce our product. We had to install dryers so we could dry the fruit before it could be packaged. And we had to have our own people on-site alongside the packing house staff to manage that process. As you can imagine, it was very different from how a packing house was used to being run. We took up way too much time and space.
Customers were telling us, “You have to figure out a
better way to do business with us. This is not easy, this is very complex.”
LB: Over the last 12 months, we have developed a new formulation that basically allows us to drop ship, and now we don’t have a need for the invasiveness of the installation process on-site. We’re getting a lot of great feedback and becoming a truly customer-centric company.
The next area of improvement in the customer experience is enhancing our product offerings, developing better solutions, and enhancing existing ones—all to make sure we have quality products in place. Our new RipeTrack toolkit is the perfect example of this part of the strategy. It enables you to measure ripeness more accurately without damaging the fruit, reliably monitor this digitized data across your operations, and maximize customer satisfaction with improved precision and predictability.
LB: Yes! If you think about it, one of the biggest problems for foodservice operators or retailers is they don’t have consistent quality fruit on their shelves, day in and day out. Take this common scenario for example: I’m a consumer of avocado. Have always been. When I go to a store, if I see a hard green avocado, I’m not buying it. Retailers want more options to add ready-to-eat, ripe avocados to the shelf. We can now measure where an avocado is in the ripening process using a tool that was developed by Apeel and a partner company.
“Apeel started as a science-based company, and its teams spent a lot of time developing the science. We have to evolve from just building the science to solving real problems for customers by better understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points.”
Luiz Beling
We also built software that allows retailers and foodservice operators to have visibility when a product is leaving a packing house, going to a distribution center, going to a retail shelf store, etc. We have A.I.-powered data analytics that can help these customers see how much on-spec, good avocado is going to the stores, and how much is not. All of that leads to a reduction in food waste as well. Win-win!
LB: We are! The next piece is the personalization of our offerings. We have to be very good at delivering not only a product that can address multiple needs, but understand the differences in needs and be able to offer a personalized product that meets each individual requirement. It is not a one-size-fits-all business. Take a manufacturer/supplier who is exporting goods and may have different needs compared to a manufacturer/supplier that is just a supplier with the masses.
The company exporting is probably having to overpack because, in that transportation, they lose mass. They have to spend a lot of money on transportation costs. With our coating, you can solve some of those problems. The problem a domestic company has is different from the one that is exporting. Your offer has to be specific to who you’re targeting. We have to continue to innovate as part of who we are. It’s in our DNA, so that’s another component of really elevating our customer experience.
LB: We are currently faced with some truly dire and impactful concerns in how food is being produced and consumed. Take climate change, or consumers adapting, changing, and demanding messaging like where and how their food is being produced. The industry has to pay attention to those trends and say, “What investments can I make to be able to solve not only today’s problems, but be able to stay ahead of the problems of the future?”
Partnerships and collaborations will be the fastest routes to these answers and solutions.
As the population grows, there are probably more people going hungry. We don’t have so much a production issue as a distribution issue. Forty-five percent of what gets produced is thrown away. That’s why partnerships are extremely important. We have to take care of the grower just as much as we have to take care of the consumer. If we work collaboratively throughout the supply chain, with new innovations and embrace technology, we can grow further.
And a lot faster.
While Luiz knows there is no time to waste in addressing the foundation of a more sustainable food system, you can sense his deep dedication to today’s problems as much as the future’s. With companies like Apeel standing at the gates of change, I have faith in walking through them with hope and excitement for what lies ahead. 
