Winter 2017

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Hazel Technologies Tackles Food Waste

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Northwestern alumni-founded startup develops products to biochemically preserve fruits and vegetables.

Hazel Technologies FruitBrite

An estimated 25 billion tons of produce goes to waste each year in the United States.

Chicago-based Hazel Technologies has an answer for that — a virtual fountain of youth for fruits and veggies that comes in a small, biodegradable sachet.

“We use bioactive ingredients to biochemically extend the shelf life of fruits, vegetables, flowers and plants,” says Hazel CEO Aidan Mouat ’16 PhD. The company manufactures packaging inserts — sachets or pads — that store and time-release gas or vapor-phase active ingredients into the storage atmosphere around the produce.

One of Hazel’s products slows the effects of ethylene, an aging hormone that triggers ripening and over-ripening responses in produce. “We can put the sachets into boxes of produce,” Mouat says, “and that sachet will slowly emit this ethylene inhibitor over time. It essentially acts as the antidote to ethylene.”

The active ingredient in Hazel’s packets is 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), which can increase the shelf life for fruits and vegetables three-fold. For an apple, that’s six to 12 months, says Mouat, and two to three weeks for a banana.

“We’re using stuff that’s had 30-plus years’ history of commercial deployment with no toxicity events whatsoever,” Mouat explains. “It’s basically the safest form of chemistry you could have anywhere near your food.”

Hazel has launched 20 pilot projects across the country and in Latin America, including with melon producer Dresick Farms Inc. in Huron, Calif. “They think our technology is kind of a game-changer for that particular market,” Mouat says.

Mouat, who studied chemistry as a doctoral student, and co-founders Adam Preslar ’16 PhD, Amy Garber ’15 MS, Patrick Flynn ’16 and Yuvaraj Kundasi ’15 MEM met in NUVention: Energy, a clean tech commercialization course co-sponsored by the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and ISEN.

“NUvention really provided the first exposure for almost everyone on the team to the concepts of building an enterprise and the ins and outs of entrepreneurship. That was pretty pivotal to be honest,” Mouat says. And ISEN, “a friend and a partner,” provided some of the initial grant money that Mouat and Preslar used to develop early product prototypes.

Hazel is one of a number of companies that have grown from ISEN. Others include SiNode Systems, which is working on silicon-graphene anodes for lithium batteries; NuMat, an advanced materials company that computationally designs and synthesizes nanoporous materials for gas storage and separation applications; and Lilac Solutions, which is developing more efficient and cost-effective methods to extract lithium from salt brines in South America.