Solving the Food Supply Chain Through Chemistry
The New Frontier of Combating Food Waste
Chemist Aidan Mouat has created a sustainable product that could save a quarter of a billion pounds of produce from going bad this year alone.
Next time you pop a grape into your mouth, consider its path from the field to your palate. From harvest to packing to storing to shipping, grapes and other produce make multiple stops and starts along the supply chain — a process that can take weeks — before landing in the grocery store. Along the way, they emit ethylene, a gas that eventually hastens ripening and spoilage. This is why, by the time those grapes reach your refrigerator, they’re starting to shrivel.
Approximately 14 percent of food produced for human consumption is lost each year along the supply chain. And every metric ton of food waste generates about 1.9 metric tons of CO2 equivalents.
What if there was an environmentally safe way to mitigate these inefficiencies? That’s the question chemist Aidan Mouat posed in 2014, when he was a PhD student at Northwestern University in Chicago. Mouat’s focus was sustainable chemistry, and through his thesis he wanted to tackle the problem of waste.
“The issue has shifted from being able to produce enough calories to being able to distribute those calories in such a way that we eliminate waste but also eliminate disparity and socio-economic strata,” he says.
Mouat’s solution lies within a sugar packet-size sachet. One of several products he has developed through his company, Hazel Technologies, the sachet contains a mixture of naturally derived chemicals that inhibit the production of ethylene. When tucked inside a 20-pound shipping box of grapes, for example, the sachet has the capacity to increase the fruit’s shelf life by threefold.
Last year, Hazel Technologies won the 2019 VentureWell Sustainable Practice Impact Award. We spoke to co-founder Mouat about his invention and his passion for minimizing waste.
“It may not be sexy thinking about supply chain efficiency,” he says, but green chemistry is all about the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle adage, “and reduce is the most important of those three.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your company.
Hazel Technologies is a post-harvest, shelf-life extension company. We make biotechnology products that allow us to prolong the shelf life of perishable food items. We take what we call naturally abundant or Earth abundant materials, like dirt or ash or sand or wood, and chemically engineer them into a solid powder that allows us to store and control the time release of active ingredients into the storage atmosphere of perishable food.
Our packaging materials and inserts contain this active biochemistry that allows us to extend perishable shelf life without adding any new chemistry into the actual food supply itself. There are no sprays, no dips, no coatings.
When we started in 2015, we were a team of just five people. But through grants and other funding from VentureWell and the USDA, we have grown so much that we now have a staff of 30. And today VentureWell owns a piece of Hazel. They went from being an early educator and grant funding opportunity to a legitimate equity-based investor.
Let’s talk about the supply chain. What are the challenges there?
Distribution is not a 100% efficient operation no matter how you slice it. It’s just not physically possible. No matter how much you try to sharpen up that supply chain, there’s only so much a digital technology can do because food will always be brick and mortar. The logistics are complex and fragmented. That’s one reason why we designed our product that way, for ease of use. It’s difficult to make all of these different pieces work together when you have something that’s very perishable and requires very specific handling parameters.
Eighty percent of world agriculture is still harvested by hand in areas that are extremely low-resource settings. Whether you’re talking about the fields of Honduras, or the jungles of the Dominican Republic, whether you’re talking about Belo Russian orchards or about Indian mango farms, it’s almost all low-tech human capital endeavors. So to suggest a country builds a two million-dollar piece of equipment is not a solution the majority of the world can adopt. You have to make something that doesn’t require all those hurdles to jump.
What drew you to the issue of waste, and to sustainability in general?
Around 2014, I was named a chemistry fellow for a group called The Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern, ISEN. In that program I was exposed to some of the broader challenges in sustainability and world systems that technology needs to address. And I developed what I guess I would call my central thesis — that the new frontier of agricultural revolution has to be ushered in by an unprecedented degree of efficiency in the supply chain that drives our food waste to zero. And that led me to Hazel.
Give us a sense of the scale and scope of food waste.
Food waste is very much a greenhouse gas problem. And I think that’s particularly relevant in the era of climate change. Every metric ton of food waste generates about 1.9 metric tons of CO2 equivalents. If it was a country, food waste would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet, behind the U.S. and China.
Each year in the U.S., we waste around 100 billion dollars in produce and food in the supply chain itself. That represents about 24% of our fresh water supply, about six percent of our annual energy budget. An excess 300 million gallons of gasoline are burned just transporting wasted food.
Talk about some of the reasons for all of this waste. What’s going on there?
The fundamental issue is that we’re all biological entities that die over time. The same is true of a piece of fruit. Biology has an expiration date. But then you start to unpack quite a lot of other information.
For example, urban densification is a strain on the supply chain. In the United States, California is responsible for about 65% or so of all specialty crop production. Food has to travel. So you have a lot of agricultural areas that are low population density and they are serving across a gigantic geographic medium. That food has to go to Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta. So we have to fight against the natural pressure of time and temperature and ethylene and disease in order to be able to distribute this food.
Who is your sachet marketed to, and how does it work?
We sell them to growers and packers in bags of however many they need. During the packing operation, they put a sachet — which is about the size of a sugar packet — into the box. That’s the entirety of the application.
The sachet stores and time-releases a vapor phase active ingredient, something we call an ethylene inhibitor. Produce emits ethylene during the aging process, and when it’s in a certain atmospheric concentration, it begins to trigger physiological responses in the fruit, causing them to age more rapidly, lose quality, and then eventually spoil and go bad. Our inhibitor is essentially the antidote to ethylene, so we’re able to stop that produce response on a hormonal level and take control of the metabolic rate of the food. By doing so we can reduce the harmful processes that cause it to go bad faster — transpiration, respiration, oxidative stress, microbial stress — and make it more resistant to all of those processes and extend shelf life by up to threefold.
Where do you see Hazel Technologies in ten years? What impact are you hoping to make?
Within the next couple of years we hope to be selling our sachets directly to consumers to use on the kitchen counter at home, where we think the real pain is. Our chemistry is FDA approved. We also hope to expand internationally over the next five years into every major agronomy on the planet. Right now we’re active in about twelve countries, and we’re on track to treat about three billion pounds of produce this year.
We estimate that that will allow us to save around a quarter of a billion pounds of produce from going bad, which allows us to prevent somewhere around 200,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent from being emitted into the atmosphere this year alone. Hazel envisions a holistic supply chain, and we’re the company that in the next ten years can put it all together all over the world for the first time.
What challenges have you faced as an entrepreneur? What advice would you give to others with similar aspirations?
Everything is a challenge. I try to view everything as an experiment. But you can never assume you know the answer going into it. I think the art of being an entrepreneur is the art of making good decisions based off of imperfect information. To be an entrepreneur you need patience and humility.
People are so proud of the things they invent, that they ignore the fact that there’s a context for every invention. Everybody should act with humility.
Have you always seen yourself as an inventor?
What I will say is I’ve always been a maker. My mother’s family are fascinating people. They never graduated any academic level higher than high school. They are the most fantastic engineers that I have ever met in my life.
My grandfather could do any single thing without really knowing that much about it, just because he’s very good at looking at what the need is, looking at what the tools are, and then creating something that fits the need. Chemistry seems like a very academic discipline, but I am a very blue-collar chemist, so to speak. I make chemicals that that fit needs.
