Clean Crop Technologies

Clean Crop Technologies aims to help feed the world sustainably by implementing its cold plasma technology across the agricultural supply chain. This technology can be applied to a variety of foods to extend shelf life and enhance food safety and can also be used to increase food production with the development of more drought resistant seeds.

Food systems worldwide are under ever increasing pressure as the earth’s population continues to grow—demographers expect there to be 9.7 billion people by 2050. At the same time, our climate is warming, which leads to more extreme weather events that impact agriculture and food security, access, and quality. The number of people who are food insecure in 2023 is expected to more than double from 2020, reaching 345 million people, and experts predict that food production needs to increase by about 70 percent to feed our future population. This will be difficult given the fact that an astonishing 30 percent of food is routinely wasted. The problem of food waste is compounded by poor food safety, particularly in developing countries where food staples may be infected by mycotoxins (the toxic substances produced by fungi). On top of this, climate-induced disasters are decreasing crop yields in many parts of the world. In India alone, climate change is expected to reduce wheat yield 19.3 percent by 2050. Agriculture itself is also a major contributor to climate change.

Clean Crop aims to address these problems and ensure that all the world’s people have access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food by deploying its technology across the agricultural supply chain, targeting increased harvest yields and decreased food waste. The cold plasma gas removes contaminants from food surfaces without residue or harmful byproducts, which makes food safer to eat and extends shelf life by three to seven days. It also enhances seed performance and makes crops stronger, reducing incidence of disease by more than 50 percent and accelerating time to germination by 10 to 15 percent. By saving food from landfills, the cold plasma process reduces the emissions produced by rotting food and thus mitigates climate change. The company’s treatment is energy efficient, with air and electricity as the only inputs, and scalable.

By investing in Clean Crop Technologies, King Philanthropies is helping to feed the world sustainably while potentially mitigating up to 1400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.