VATIS UPDATE Article

Twenty-year-old student Amit Gal-Or from Ra’anana, Israel, has designed and developed a product that can prolong the life of fruit and vegetables for months. Gal-Or, who now lives in Shanghai, established his Phresh company in 2015 when he decided to use old technology and Israeli research to benefit individual households. “The technology originated in research from over a decade ago at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev when an Israeli scientist sought ways to use oils to create organic preservative properties,” explained Gal-Or.

“These oils have been known about for thousands of years, but they are very volatile and evaporate very rapidly so their effectiveness disappears very quickly. The researchers wanted to transform the preservative properties into a liquid or powder and then release it very slowly and therefore multiply its effectiveness,” Gal-Or said. Gal-Or and his team then set about combining past research to create a powder that does not need to be sprayed or applied to the produce to provide protection.

Instead, the powder dissolves piecemeal and can preserve the produce for up to three times longer than usual. Using these powders for the household simply “made sense,” Gal-Or said. Strawberries, for example, usually go bad after three days, and yet we can keep them good for consumption for another four or five days. At the other extreme, there are things like eggplant and potatoes that last weeks. Gal-Or said that Phresh will soon be launching an intensive e-commerce campaign and that the product is already expanding from China, where Gal-Or lives, into the United States, Europe, Japan, and Israel.