T156 , 1 year ago

According to Snopes and Reuters (Reuters 2), it seems to be a bit more on the crazy conspiracy side.

According to the article, Apeel Sciences makes a product called “Edipeel”, which is an edible protective coating that’s meant to “help produce stay fresher for longer”. From the second Reuters article, Apeel is also the name of a surface cleaner concentrate manufactured by Evans Vanodine (EV), a different company based in the UK, but the identical names appear to have confused people, who think that surface cleaner is being sprayed on their food. Evidence for this seems to be a data safety sheet from EV about the Apeel surface cleaner concentrate that someone on Tiktok confused for being about the Edipeel product coating, and went viral.

Since Apeel Sciences also received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in 2012 and 2015, it appears to have also been folded into the Bill Gates conspiracies, with comments like “It’s Bill Gates way in exterminating the population simply because Covid didn’t work for him”.

The company has also been accused of using “toxic mono & diglycerides [sic]” (also with the suggestion that Apeel Sciences was founded by Bill Gates, which is not correct), which is disproven by the company itself, an expert Reuters consulted, and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with the compounds being “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA. Those compounds are usually made when your body digests food, and the amount you’d eat with the coating is not significant enough to cause issues.

Summary

Likely conspiracy nonsense, either due to confusion between the produce coating Apeel Sciences makes, and the Apeel cleaner concentrate from a different company, or from misinformation surrounding the compounds the coating is made from, exacerbated by Apeel Sciences having received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (and therefore being associated with them).