Catalyst Programme

A cold room has to earn enough to cover its costs. This pillar helps you build a business model around a pricing strategy that balances what cooling users can afford with what the cold room needs to run sustainably. Clear governance supports it, with defined roles and responsibilities, including who owns and operates the cold room and how revenue is shared. You also explore how to establish links with buyers and institutional offtakers, and how these links secure demand and strengthen the model. You finish with a draft business plan and clear next steps, and share your experience to help other cold storage businesses build their own.

Coldtivate is a free, open-source mobile application developed by the Your VCCA team to digitalise operations at cold rooms. It records every crate that comes in and goes out of the room, and tells cooling users how many days their produce will stay fresh, so they can plan when to sell. As part of this pillar, the team helps you get started with the application, develops an adoption plan, and regularly reviews the progress. If you are a software company interested in self-hosting, the team guides you over the most important steps to help you run and commercialise your own version. By the end, your team uses Coldtivate to operate your cold rooms or, as a software company, you have a plan to run your own version. By sharing how you use Coldtivate, or your own version of it, you give other companies a practical example to follow.

Cooling users need to trust a cold room before they use it. This pillar provides training and materials to the people in your organisation who train cold room operators and conduct farmer and vendor training. Operator training includes sessions on how to optimise multi-commodity storage and digitally manage cold rooms with Coldtivate, and farmer training is centred around engaging awareness-raising activities and material tested in the field. By the end, you have ready-made comics, training material, and videos in multiple languages to explain the benefits of cooling to farmers, and, if you adopt Coldtivate, trainers certified to teach it. Sharing your training approach and its results then helps other cold storage businesses build trust with their own cooling users.

Your experience in the programme can help other companies facing similar challenges. When you join, Your VCCA introduces your organisation on its comms channels. Once your engagement ends, it features your experience through short profiles and posts and selected participants are invited to contribute to case studies or video testimonials. This gives your organisation visibility and helps you connect with other companies and partners working on cold storage. Nothing is published without your approval.