VLOOKUP is also case sensitive. If you type your look_up value as “apples” and you have an “Apples” in your data, then “Apples” would not be found.
Also, if you return with an #N/A error, it could mean that the match for the lookup_value doesn’t exist or another bug. If you used an exact match, try looking for an approximate match. You can also clean up your data of spaces, make sure everything is typed correctly, and double check to see if Excel is storing any numbers as text (which can be fixed by selecting a cell, clicking on the green button and have Excel mark it as a number).