With plant science and AI, GreenPod Labs is tackling India’s food waste problem
Founded in 2023, Chennai-based GreenPod Labs helps fruits stay fresh for longer by using the fruit's natural defences. It has raised around Rs 7 crore in venture funding.
India is the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, however, an estimated 15-40% of fresh produce in the country never makes it to consumers, according to the Central Institute of Post-Harvest Engineering and Technology. The reasons are varied, including poor storage, lengthy transport chains, and outdated handling methods. The brunt of these inefficiencies is foremostly faced by farmers who suffer economic losses. Moreover, the loss of produce also results in higher prices for buyers.
For Deepak Rajmohan, this wasn’t just a statistic. It became the reason to leave a job in the US and start over in India.
Rajmohan, a food scientist by training, had been working in the US with the Happy Family organic and baby food brand after completing his master’s in food science from Oklahoma State University. He had earlier studied agricultural engineering at Anna University, Chennai. Despite building a solid research career abroad, the persistent issue of food waste in India weighed heavily on him.
“This problem has remained under-addressed for over two decades,” he says in a conversation with YourStory. “I felt like no one was solving it.”
In 2019, he quit his job, returned to India, and travelled across Tamil Nadu’s villages, speaking with farmers, exporters, traders, and retailers. The on-ground conversations gave him insight into the real pain points in India’s food supply chain. In 2020, he launched , based in Chennai.
A different kind of packaging
GreenPod Labs makes products that help fruits stay fresh for longer by using the fruit's natural defences. “Fruits and vegetables have their immune system, similar to ours. Our technology activates that system to delay spoilage,” Rajmohan says.
The company’s core product is a paper-based sachet coated with active ingredients derived from around 15-20 plant compounds. Some of these ingredients are extracted in-house, while others are sourced. “We study the crop’s internal biochemical pathways and design products based on what needs to be activated,” he adds.
However, the sachet is placed inside the packaging box, where it releases the compounds in controlled amounts, helping delay spoilage without the need for refrigeration.
These sachets are placed inside packaging boxes and do not require refrigeration. They help increase the shelf life of fruits by 40-60%, the startup claims, which reduces spoilage and improves the quality of the produce.
GreenPod Labs doesn’t own a manufacturing plant. Instead, it works with contract manufacturers, while its team oversees the work at those sites. The company prepares the ingredients in-house and applies them to special coated paper. “The coated paper is printed, made into the final product, and then sent to customers, who place them in their boxes,” says Rajmohan.
The company's current focus is on bananas, mangoes, and citrus fruits. Each commodity has its own set of product variations, like moisture absorber sheets for bananas, fruit coatings for citrus, and soon-to-be-launched respiration control packaging for mangoes.
Data science in the fields and the lab
Although the product is based on biological science, GreenPod Labs makes wide use of AI and data in both research and customer engagement.
On the customer side, the company has built digital tools that help check the quality of crops on farms, such as pulp percentage, fruit size, and other details, especially for bananas and mangoes.
Also, within the company, AI helps in finding new ingredients and scaling up manufacturing from small batches to large production. “We use data science to discover new ingredients and to scale manufacturing from small prototypes to large volumes,” Rajmohan says. The team uses tools like YOLO for image analysis, CNNs for sorting, and other models to gather insights. “We don’t use foundational AI models, but we work with wrappers,” he adds.
Growing revenue, one product at a time
GreenPod Labs follows a direct product sales model and works primarily with B2B clients, mostly exporters. It currently has over 100 customers.
However, the pricing varies by fruit. For bananas, products range between Rs 2.5 to Rs 6 per unit (with one unit covering 13 kg of produce), and for mangoes, it’s around Rs 3 to Rs 5 per unit (per 5 kg). “Every unit is sold directly to our clients based on volume,” Rajmohan says.
The company was commercially launched in late 2023 after several years of R&D and pilot testing. Its early customers were small-scale mango traders transporting produce across long distances, but today, the focus has shifted to exporters and large traders for bananas and mangoes, and domestic markets for citrus.
Rajmohan admits that the early years were challenging. One of the biggest mistakes was thinking that just finding a problem would be enough to get customers interested. “We entered crops like tomatoes, where spoilage is high. But the market had no interest in paying to reduce waste. That was a big lesson.
Customers care about economics, not just problems,” he says.
Another challenge was educating the market. “It’s a new category. No one had seen a product like this before. So there was a lot of resistance, and we had to do a lot of explaining,” he adds.
GreenPod Labs has a 25-member team, with 22 of them based in Chennai, while a few sales team members are posted in Maharashtra and Punjab, based on seasonal demand. These staff rotate between markets depending on harvest cycles.
The company has built its own operations tools—from production logging to inventory management—using only Google Sheets and internal systems. “We’ve not used any ERP. Everything is built from scratch based on what we need,” he says.
Funding and focus
GreenPod Labs has raised around Rs 7 crore between 2022 and 2024 from Indian Angel Network and a few other venture capital firms across India, Europe, and the US.
Rajmohan says his startup faces competition from companies like AgroFresh, Sufresca, Apeel Sciences, and YSL Technologies. However, it remains focused on select crops and aims to lead in those areas.
“For every commodity we enter, we want to capture 50-60% of the market. We choose carefully and go deep, rather than wide,” Rajmohan says.
What’s next?
GreenPod Labs is now developing a full-stack solution for bananas. This includes modified atmospheric packaging, expected to be available by September 2025, and pre-harvest interventions such as thermal shock protection, which is scheduled to launch by mid-2026.
India remains the main market, but GreenPod is eyeing international expansion. Discussions are underway with partners in Ecuador and the US, particularly in the import-export space. “We are not entering the US retail market yet, but we are working with customers involved in international shipments,” Rajmohan says.
Edited by Kanishk Singh