“Pay-as-you-chill” cold storage solutions in Zambia
THE QUESTION
Can the provision of a pay-as-you-go cold storage platform reduce food waste and increase financial sustainability and productivity of smallholder farmers and market vendors in Zambia?.
LOCATION: Zambia
SECTOR: Agriculture
TECH: Chatbot
TIMELINE: May 2019 - Closed
PIONEER: Magdalena Johansson
PARTNERS: Kukula Seed Fund Unlimited
The Challenge
In Zambia, post-harvest food losses and waste contribute to food insecurity, loss of productivity and income potential. Vegetables and fruits account for the largest portion of waste due to inadequate packaging and lack of environmentally controlled storage. Climate change may cause temperatures to rise by 6 degrees Celcius in Zambia, which puts 48% of Zambia’s population that works in agriculture at serious risk. Additionally, 48% of Zambians are unable to meet calorie requirements, 33% of women in reproductive age have anaemia and 35% of children under 5 are stunted, which imperils their future and consequently reduces Zambia’s ability to form a more specialised labour force.
The Idea
This pilot provided access to Cold Storage Units as a “pay-as-you-go” service and tested to see if the business model could be self-sustaining and commercially viable. Such a service could reduce food waste by extending the shelf-life of food and result in savings for food vendors from the reduction in lost produce and committed buyer partnerships. If successful, these savings may pass down to the consumer and improve overall food security.
The Journey
What we learned
A key takeaway from this pilot is that to implement a market-driven innovative solution, implementers must engage the target and surrounding population as early as possible. Innovators must learn about the local conditions, unwritten rules that govern local dynamics, whether the target population is actually the appropriate one and most importantly, influence and gain the trust of the target population about the solution. In the case of this pilot, our original target population ended up not needing our solution, but we didn’t know this until we fully engaged with them at the market.
When piloting an innovation in environments with high uncertainty, we learned that having a flexible and adaptive implementation design is preferable to a more structured one. In retrospect, we feel it would have been helpful to test alternative business models in parallel, as we invested all of our energy in an unfeasible model.
It is important to have partners who can support the tech and provide tech support, as we had many challenges with the unit that could only be solved by tech support partners.
All photos on this page were taken by the pilot’s implementing partners, QCEL, Insulated Systems Ltd., Kukula Seed, Ubuntu Research and Rural Development Company Ltd.What happened next?
The pilot team tested the second business model, where the cold room was located between small-holder farmers and restaurants as a distribution hub, to see if it was financially viable.
Read more
Learn about how cold storage could eliminate food waste — “Can cold hubs really reduce food wastage?”
Read the emerging learnings from the pilot — PAYC in Zambia
Read about the pilot’s pivot to a food delivery service — “Bringing pay-as-you-chill cold solutions to Zambian farmers directly!”