The idea of harnessing biotech to preserve fruit and veg isn't unique to Coating+, however.
Fruit-basket sellers, biotech companies, coffee-shop chains: They have all fallen victim to this year's chill in the market for initial public offerings.
It's about an emotionally disconnected, fruit-loving Silicon Valley biotech entrepreneur named Tom Owens, "a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom".
Less than a week ago, a deal with another biotech, Cambridge, Mass.-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals, bore fruit: an anticancer drug candidate.
Neal Carter, president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, an investor-owned biotech company, bets you won't.
However, very few of the world's fruit or vegetable growers have had a biotech option, nor have the farmers who grow wheat, barley, rice, potatoes or pulse crops.
The biotech has created a transparent gelatinous coating that is sprayed onto fresh fruit and vegetables to prolong their shelf life.
US regulators have approved what would be the first commercialised biotech apples, rejecting efforts by the organic industry and other GMO critics to block the new fruit.
He says that many of the biotech firms are merely intermediating between the universities and "Big Pharma", the distributors and marketers of the fruits of academia's invention.
Some argue that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked: the IT revolution has run its course and other new technologies like biotech have yet to make a major impact on our lives.
