Apeel company announced layoffs for 105 employees which means around 27 percent of the workforce compared to its total headcount in the company.
Attributing layoffs to what sounds like growing pains, innovative food preserver Apeel released roughly 27 percent of its workforce in North America, Europe, and South America last month, including several dozen people at its Goleta headquarters. It was the second set of job losses at Apeel, which employed about 445 people worldwide and in August 2021 boasted of raising $250 million in capital for the company, which was valued at $2 billion.
Apeel was started in 2012 by UC Santa Barbara graduate James Rogers, who had wondered why there was so much hunger in a world that seemed so abundant. He soon learned the reason was rotted the oxidation of fruits and vegetables and he began to work on “naturally derived coatings [that] essentially stop water loss and oxidation, the main causes of rotting, but are completely flavorless, edible, and benign,” as the Independent reported in 2016.
