Rice startup NIVERA says its edible coating nearly triples produce shelf life

Neethu Pottackal, who earned her Rice doctorate in 2025, founded the company. For anyone who ships, packs or sells fresh produce, the announcement raises two practical questions: where in the chain a coating like this gets applied, and what it has to prove before anyone pays for it. The design and the lab history behind it answer more of those questions than the headline figure does.

A barrier against three kinds of spoilage

Harvested produce is still alive. Fruits and vegetables keep losing moisture, keep exchanging gases with the air around them and stay open to bacteria and fungi, and each of those processes moves them toward the trash bin. NIVERA's coating is designed to slow all three. It forms a protective layer against moisture loss, oxidation and microbial growth.

The coating uses a plant-based matrix for structure, with other natural components added for mechanical stability and antimicrobial properties. The ingredients are naturally derived, including proteins and fibers, and some come from agricultural by-products. According to Rice News, that sourcing could lower production costs while making use of waste streams that already exist. A coating made from one kind of farm waste to prevent another kind is a tidy loop, if the costs work out.

The work combines two labs. Pottackal's co-advisers were Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering, whose materials science group guided the formulation, and Daniel Preston, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose lab contributed spray-coating expertise and experience turning lab results into working technology. Pottackal has said the project looks at how the materials interact with each other as well as at the materials themselves.

Rice tried this once before with eggs

NIVERA isn't Ajayan's group's first attempt at coating produce. The award was meant to move a low-cost, egg-based coating from lab scale to pilot scale, for use on fruits and vegetables of many shapes.

Surplus eggs were the raw material for that coating. Rahman's project grew out of earlier work on it, which found that the egg-based coating doubled how long avocados, bananas and other fruit stayed fresh. In the 2021 Tech Briefs Create the Future competition, the coating earned Rahman and Ajayan a win in the Sustainable Technologies/Future Energy category.

Put the two projects side by side and a pattern becomes clear: build the coating from something that would otherwise be wasted, aim it at moisture loss and microbial growth, and target crops like avocados where the payoff is easy to see. NIVERA's coating is made from proteins and fibers, some drawn from agricultural by-products, and the company's testing puts the gain at nearly triple, against double for the egg-based coating.

That comparison has a real limit. The doubling came from published research on one coating. The near-tripling comes from a startup's internal tests on a different coating, under conditions Rice News did not describe.

Applied before the produce ships

Preston describes the goal as keeping produce fresh for the entire journey from harvest through packing, transit and the supermarket shelf. His mechanical engineering lab contributed expertise in spray-coating applications, according to Rice News. For operators, that suggests a treatment that could fit into a step where produce is already being washed, sorted or packed, rather than a separate process added somewhere else.

The crops chosen point to who would feel the effect first. Avocados and berries are expensive and spoil quickly, so the people most exposed are grower-shippers, packinghouse managers and retail fresh-category buyers whose shrink on those items adds up fastest. For operators whose losses happen mostly in transit and in distribution-center holding, a coating applied upstream could matter more than one applied at the store. For a produce manager dealing mainly with shoppers squeezing fruit, it probably matters less.

From launch prize to first customer

Pottackal went through the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's Innovation Fellows program and the Rice Venture Scholars initiative. She also won $25,000 at the Napier Rice Launch Challenge, part of a series of university startup competitions that helped her move the technology from the lab toward a business.

Rahman's egg-coating project shows which stage counts most for this kind of technology. His NSF award was specifically about scaling from lab to pilot, because a coating that works on a lab bench still has to work at packing-line speed on fruit of every shape.