James Rogers
Every year, many thousands of entrepreneurs take their ideas to market. Most fail. While every aspiring innovator believes their idea will be the next big thing, for most, reaching unicorn status is as fictional as the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. In 2020, only 76 startups worldwide made their mark as a unicorn.
Apeel Founder James Rogers is one of the few entrepreneurs to have beaten the odds, taking his garage-experiment to create a plant-based preservative coating for fruit and vegetables to billion-dollar heights. And the world took notice; Rogers earned a rank in Fortune’s 40 under 40, a place in the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers and made Time magazine’s list of 50 Genius Companies.
After launching with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant, Apeel attracted big-name investors and even celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry. The biggest supermarkets across the U.S. and Europe are now home to Apeel-coated produce: it delivers a powerful double whammy solution to the 2.5 trillion dollar food waste problem and the single-use plastic crisis, prolonging the shelf-life of produce and replacing plastic as a preservative wrapping for groceries.
Apeel may be set for fast-tracked growth, but Rogers’ billion-dollar idea didn’t fly off the shelf. He had studied metallurgy and then spent six and a half years as a PhD student experimenting with creating a paint that could harness solar energy before his unlikely pivot into entrepreneurship.
He was was listening to a podcast on global hunger as he drove home early one morning after spending the night shift watching solar paint dry in a lab in California: “It might have just washed right over, but as I gazed at the lush, green farmland, all I could think was: don’t we have these magical seeds that we put in the ground and they absorb water and sunlight, produce food and self-propagate? It’s the closest thing I know to magic.
“That stuck with me. It was the first domino that flipped. I got curious and went down this rabbit-hole.”
Rogers set off on a mission to understand why global hunger persists despite the abundance of food in the world. Eventually, he came across a paper that said all produce is seasonal as well as perishable, and that clicked: “I realised you’re either in a surplus or you don’t have anything. It’s the intermittency of production that is the problem.
“People were going hungry because they couldn’t trade, and they didn’t have the ability to trade because their food went bad. This happened to food because water goes out and oxygen goes in.”
He had identified some of the critical missing links to the problem of food supply and demand, but it was his background in metallurgy - a scientific discipline focused on metals - and the years he’d spent creating solar paint that became the critical link to his billion-dollar idea.
“I remembered metallurgists created this clever technique to incorporate certain atoms inside of template steel, like chromium, for example. It would react with oxygen and form this little barrier around the outside that stopped more oxygen from getting in. That was the innovation of stainless steel. If we could put a little barrier around the food, it could help solve the problem of food going bad."
“I had spent six and a half years of my life watching solar paint dry. Honestly, I thought, if someone had been training to solve this problem his whole life, it was me. That was the impetus kicking everything off,” says Rogers.
He sharpened his idea; the barrier would have to be effective but edible, made with natural, plant-based ingredients. After talking to hundreds of people and potential investors, a gentleman wrote him a check for $50,000 - enough for him and a co-worker to submerge into a world of guess and check experimentation in his garage.
“I was knowledgeable in material science and understood what was happening at the microscopic level, but it took time to make progress with finding an edible coating that would keep water in and oxygen out for fruits and vegetables.
“The first years were just a belief that if it was possible, we were going to figure it out, and if it wasn’t, we would be happy we tried.
“After those first results, we started to think big picture; how would it ripple through the system? Instead of food going bad in days, it could now last weeks without refrigeration. That was big.”
