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Insert Extends Avocado Shelf Life By Two to Four Days

Mission Produce launches a post-harvest program that uses a food-safe, biodegradable packaging insert to extend the shelf life of avocados while minimizing operational impact to the supply chain.

AvoLast Powered by Hazel® relies on a quarter-sized biodegradable, food-safe sachet that blocks ethylene receptors when it is inserted into a shipping case of avocados.
AvoLast Powered by Hazel® relies on a quarter-sized biodegradable, food-safe sachet that blocks ethylene receptors when it is inserted into a shipping case of avocados.

For the past decade, one top-of-mind sustainability challenge has been the reduction of food waste and the resulting adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts. From an environmental perspective, “in the U.S. alone, food distribution waste consumes about 6% of our total energy budget and 24% of our fresh water, and generates somewhere around 300 million metric tons of harmful emissions.” That’s according to Aidan Mouat, CEO & Co-Founder of Hazel Technologies, a USDA-funded (it has received $1 million in grants thus far) agricultural technology company that has partnered with Mission Produce to introduce a shelf-life extension program for Hass avocados.

AvoLast Powered by Hazel® relies on a quarter-sized biodegradable, food-safe sachet that blocks ethylene receptors, extending the ripe shelf life of an avocado by two to four days. For more than a year, Hazel worked with Mission Produce, the world’s largest supplier of avocados, to test, validate, and perfect its technology—Hazel® 1-MCP—throughout Mission’s global supply chain.

According to Mission Produce Sr. Director for Business Development Patrick Cortes, the year-long development phase gave Mission the opportunity to ensure the product worked and, even more so, that it made a significant difference in the fruit’s extended quality and shelf life. “Our research team felt it necessary to test the Hazel 1-MCP product in various environments for a prolonged period before exposing it to consumers,” he says.

As Mouat explains, the basis for all of Hazel’s core technologies is the controlled release of active ingredients from solid materials. “We start with natural materials and modify them to become functional for storing and time-releasing atmospheric active ingredients. The core innovation is the controlled release—we are not inventing new types of active ingredients, but rather allowing a more dynamic deployment of industry-standard and food-safe active ingredients that have been academically validated.”


Learn more about technologies that extend product shelf life in these articles from Packaging World magazine:

Benefits of Flexible Packaging for Fighting Food Waste

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