Cold room operators can use Coldtivate to keep track of all checked-in and check-out crates in a cold room. Digitalising the inventory management system allows cooling companies and users to remotely monitor the current and predicted occupancy of the cold room, the inside temperature, and keep track of the storage fees in a hassle-free manner.

For each checked-in crate, the app calculates the time to pick up, a prediction of the number of days each crop is still good for. This calculation depends on factors such as the type of commodity, the room temperature, and the initial quality of the produce. As the temperature in the room might change to adjust for the mixed fruits and vegetables being stored at the facility, the pick-up time is recalculated multiple times per day, and users are notified about crates that are approaching the end of storage life.

Coldtivate’s Knowledge Hub contains information about best practices in post-harvest handling and storage, and is being regularly expanded and enriched to reflect the best practices in post-harvest management as per latest research. Farmers and traders who are not using any room are still able to access the Knowledge Hub and learn about the potential benefits of cold storage.

Smallholder farmers and petty traders with smartphones can register on the app, locate cold rooms in their vicinity, and monitor activity of the cold rooms, including the rooms’ occupancy, temperature, and the number of remaining storage life days for each crate they have in storage. Cooling users without smartphones are notified by SMS about the remaining quality of their stored crops.

In India and Nigeria, the app displays historical market data and forecasts the price of selected commodities across different regions, powered by regularly updated machine learning models. This information, combined with the remaining storage life, provides insights for cold room users on when and where to sell the crops in storage.

The digitalisation of the inventory allows for transparent monitoring of business performance across different cold rooms and time periods. The data is automatically analysed and summary statistics are displayed in Coldtivate’s Impact Dashboard, which cooling companies can export to showcase their creditworthiness to external stakeholders. The Impact Dashboard also includes impact data on postharvest loss and revenue evolution collected via built-in user surveys.

Linking physical and digital crates in Coldtivate allows cold room operators to quickly retrieve information about each crate in storage, reduce the time needed to complete check-in and check-out operations, and minimise mix-up of produce, strengthening farmers’ trust in the solution.

The cold chain is made of multiple blocks that need to be seamlessly integrated to guarantee minimal crop spoilage from farm to fork. We have integrated cold transportation in Coldtivate, namely the possibility for crates stored in a cold room to be transferred to refrigerated trucks (or vice-versa) with a simple click. The integration of temperature data from the cold rooms and trucks is used to refine storage-life predictions and ensure the quality of the produce is monitored throughout the cold chain.

Data collected by Coldtivate can be leveraged by smallholder farmers and traders to show a proof of consistent fee payment, which, in the absence of collateral, can help them access financial services such as microcredits. The Farmers’ Dashboard enables cooling users to visualise summary statistics on their utilisation patterns across cold rooms and postharvest loss and revenue evolution, helping them track the benefit of using cold storage and incentivise cold room adoption.