13 March 2023
Meet the winners: Your VCCA Incubator
Your VCCA has identified five among the world's leading cooling companies in the agricultural value chain to work with under its Incubator Program. Let's meet them!
Following a rigorous selection process, Your VCCA has identified five among the world’s leading cooling companies in the agricultural value chain to work with under its Incubator Program.
The selected companies are receiving technical assistance from BASE and Empa to integrate the servitisation Cooling as a Service business model in their operations and to digitalise cold room management with the open-source and data-driven mobile application, Coldtivate.
Meet the companies building sustainable food cold chains to improve smallholder livelihood.
Based in the Philippines, Fresh Depot is an in-house initiative of the Aboitiz Group that aims to address the high rates of post-harvest and income loss for farmers. Fresh Depot’s massive transformative purpose is prosperous farmers feeding the Philippines. It is an innovative seed-to-market solution, with decentralised, modular, and sustainable cold storage as its first step.
Fresh Depot will be the first portable cold storage network available to farmers in the country. The endeavour’s ultimate vision is to help farmers optimise their harvest and maximise their earning potential by empowering them with sustainable, innovative solutions powered by data, and providing access to capital and direct market linkage.
In 2023, Fresh Depot is gearing up for the launch of its pilot program in Mankayan, Benguet, where it will be integrating the YourVCCA solution. In partnership with the local government, a university and a farmers’ cooperative, the pilot will deploy a portable, solar-powered cold storage unit of 5-metric tons at a local trading centre, where thousands of farmers and traders buy and sell produce that will make its way to the rest of the Philippine regions for consumption. There are around 80,000 farmers in Benguet, including from neighbouring towns of other provinces, such as Bauko (within Mountain Province) and Tinoc (a town of Ifugao).
2. IMPAGRO FARMING SOLUTIONS AND PLUSS ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES
Based in India, Impagro Farming Solutions works on building first-mile fruit and vegetable supply chain solutions that connect farmers with innovative agronomic and post-harvest service and technology providers. They are currently developing Crop Plans that provide farmers with a one-stop solution to switch to sustainable farming, and supply chain solutions for international food companies under pressure to become more sustainable.
For their new pilot cold room in Madhya Pradesh, which will be run on a Cooling as Service business model and integrate the Coldtivate app, Impagro is collaborating with Pluss Advanced Technologies Ltd. Pluss is a materials research and manufacturing company using science and technology to help design and develop people-centric and climate-positive innovative clean technologies that enable us to meet the Sustainable Development Goals while empowering a circular economy.
Together, they are setting up a 20 metric tons cold room to store seasonal fruits and vegetables in Khamariya Nimawar in Madhya Pradesh’s Raisen district. Using state-of-the-art technologies, such as solar-based micro rooms, thermal energy storage, and energy-efficient glycol based cooling system using low-GWP refrigerant, their cold room aims to serve 100 to 150 farmers, with potential for expansion to villages in Gujarat and Rajasthan, India.
3. LEAP ENERGY
Leap Energy was established in 2013 with the objective of increasing farmer access to sustainable, productive-use, off-grid energy for powering agricultural services, including cold storages. Of their 13 operational sites in Nigeria, two have been identified as pilot sites for digitalising inventory and remotely monitoring the shelf-life of fresh produce in storage.
Both the rooms, Adonai Foods in Oginibo, Delta State, and LATC in Abuja of 20 metric tons and 10 metric tons respectively, run on solar power in real-time, that gets stored in batteries and phase-change technology for use in the evening or at a later date.
Leap Energy is partnering with Adonai Foods to deploy cold rooms more extensively in the market hubs of towns across Nigeria. Through these cold rooms, they envision reaching over 200 cooling users, including downstream vendors.
SuGree Products stands for Sustainable Green Products. SuGree Products was started in 2019 by professionals with more than 30 years of experience in engineering, service, and finance to provide products and services that are good for the environment and profitable for both their users and providers.
SuGree’s associate Chill Chain has newly built a controlled-atmosphere cold room with 650 metric tons of capacity to serve as a Mother Cold Storage Room for in the pilot city of Vadodara, Gujarat, India. A smaller sized solar-power cold room, called a satellite, will be built near a fruit and vegetable market to reduce food loss at the retailers’ end.
The Chill Chain Cold Room is located at Channi, Vadodara, which is entirely solar-powered and runs on eco-friendly refrigerants only. Following suit, the new satellite cold rooms will also harness solar energy, along with a solar tracking system for higher yield through the day. Furthermore, the room integrates a thermal energy storage system to even out the thermal load fluctuations. By digitalising the cold room operations under the YourVCCA Incubator, SuGree hopes to reduce the information gap between the operator and the cooling users and bring more transparency and efficiency to the maintenance of records, bookings, invoicing, and the management information system.
The pilot site for the YourVCCA solution will reach between 250 and 300 farmers, wholesalers, retailers who will be using the facility on a pay-per-use basis. Following the first stage of roll-out, the YourVCCA solution can be deployed to 8 other cold rooms in Gujarat and Maharashtra, India.
Ecozen has been enabling farm-to-fork value chains for perishables globally through cost-effective cold storage units that harness solar energy and unique thermal energy-based technology for optimum compressor usage since 2010. YourVCCA will be integrated into Ecozen’s 5-metric ton solar cold room in Isibania, Kenya, potentially reaching 250+ farmers.
Stay tuned to follow the journeys of the cooling companies in building agricultural resilience!
