Food Huggers is a line of silicone caps for keeping half-eaten fruits and veggies fresh. Photo: Food Huggers They come in four sizes, ensuring a snug fit on a variety of eats. Photo: Food Huggers It's a clever, non-wasteful alternative to the usual plastic baggy. Photo: Food Huggers Think of all the tomatoes you'll save! Photo: Food Huggers An Apple gettin' hugged. Photo: Food Huggers Nice orange pep gettin' hugged. Photo: Food Huggers The designers came up with an avocado-specific piece as a stretch goal for their successful Kickstarter campaign.Photo: Food Huggers They come in a buncha colors, too. Photo: Food Huggers

Good on you. You went to the farmer's market, to support local growers. You loaded up on a bounty of fruits and veggies. You made a little tomato salad for yourself instead of settling for some processed snack. But now you've got a problem. You've got half of a tomato left. So you put it back in the baggie it came in, spin it tight in some vague nod towards preservation, and stick it in one of the lower compartments of the refrigerator. There it sits, its invisible, ever-ripening presence weighing on you like the Tell-Tale Heart. Every subsequent snack becomes an active decision on not to eat that tomato; to let it sit there, and go overripe, and ultimately meet its fate in the middle of your trashcan. And in that moment, all that good work you did is undone.

>In a sense, the Food Huggers were a product of guilt.

Adrienne McNicholas and Michelle Ivankovic have been there too. But as veterans of the design-forward housewares company Umbra, they knew there had to be something better for storing nature's snacks than all those sad plastic baggies. Out of that conviction came Food Huggers, a collection of dishwasher-, microwave-, and freezer-safe silicone caps designed to preserve half-consumed fruits and vegetables. They're even easier to use than a sandwich bag, if that's possible. Just take your half-whatever, press it down into the Hugger of the appropriate size, and you're set. You can feel good about the choices you've made.

In a sense, the Food Huggers were a product of guilt. "I hated feeling like every half tomato or onion was a race against the clock that I knew I would lose," McNicholas says. The problem, they sensed, was a universal one. But the solution wasn't immediately obvious. For a while, the duo tinkered with concepts involving fully-enclosed vessels, though nothing quite clicked. The a-ha moment came when they realized nature had already done a good bit of the work for them. "At some point it was like 'why are we covering the skin that is already doing a great job of protecting the produce?'" McNicholas says. So they changed tack and started thinking about a container that would only cover a fruit's vulnerable inner-face.

After experimenting with dozens of chunks of silicone, they zeroed in on a workable design. In final form, a Food Huggers set comprises four caps of varying sizes. Each overlaps a bit with its immediate siblings, in terms of the size of thing it can accommodate, ensuring that there's always one that can handle the job at hand. From the looks of things, the Huggers can fit snugly around onions, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and more. And since they lock in those sweet, sweet juices, hugged fruits can end up looking even better than they would after similar stints in their former Ziploc digs.

>Hugged fruits lock in those sweet, sweet juices.

McNicholas and Michelle Ivankovic recently ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the product; it pulled in nearly $200,000–around seven times the amount they were asking for. Along the way, they added an avocado-specific Hugger as part of a stretch goal (Ivankovic points out that McNicholas is "avocado royalty;" her grandfather lent his name to the Murray Red). All that demand makes one thing clear. Flawed though we may be, we want to be responsible stewards of our fruits and vegetables. If you're starting to feel guilty, you can preorder a set for $19 on the Food Huggers site.