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Over 45% of agricultural harvest spoils before it reaches the customer. In 42°C heat, fresh tomatoes and greens rot in 48 hours, placing a deadline on smallholder farmers. That's why small vegetable farmers have to sell it immediately to middlemen at a fraction of its value because they take on the risks that farmers can't afford. The farmers earn just 8% of the value chain profit while taking on 53% of cost.
With unreliable electricity and currency inflating over 100% per year, conventional refrigeration is uneconomical. A 3-tonne compressor room costs $52,000 and requires 5.5 kW diesel generators that cost $48/day to fuel.
the World Food Bank has funded many projects to help alleviate the famine by consolidating demand and supply but they all require funding to operate and once the funding the stops the middleman that used to carry this work would have been out of work for years. a profitable commercial solution would be more beneficial for the country, here is my proposition:
Vapor compression refrigeration is the wrong physics for hot, dry emerging markets. Forced-air evaporative cooling achieves 17.5x higher energy efficiency (0.73 kWh per 500kg cycle vs 12.8 kWh) at 77% lower CapEx ($4,000/ton vs $17,330/ton), making 100% off-grid solar-battery storage economically viable.
Evaporative cooling efficiency is highest where the air is hottest and driest.
The African Sahel corridor is extremely hot (40°C–46°C) and semi-arid (~20% relative humidity) almost year-round making it the perfect environment for Evaporative Cooling.
In hot and dry climates, it delivers an immediate 15°C temperature drop (down to 27.5°C) and elevates internal relative humidity to 88%, halting crop transpiration and shriveling.
Fresh tomatoes: extended from 2 to 10–14 days.
Peppers & cucumbers: extended from 2 days to 9–14 days respectively.
Red onions: extended from 14 days to 100+ days without rotting
Energy consumption is only 0.73 kWh per 500kg cycle, compared to 12.8 kWh for traditional vapor-compression AC units, allowing us to simply mount one solar panel to power the chamber off grid
Assembled locally by 2 welders in just 2 to 3 days without requiring specialized equipment.
Manufacturing cost: $2,000/unit
Operating expenses: <$100/year for maintenance (100% solar powered)
designed and field tested in India and Nigeria by MIT.
The unit economics of the vegetables currently (source: DOI:10.32474/CIACR.2018.05.000219)
Direct Farm-Gate Purchase Price (Paid to Farmer) 33%
Speculative Middleman 21%
Central Wholesaler 14%
vegetables sellers 32% (they sell small quantities and lose 20%-30% to spoilage)
Total Consumer Retail Price = 100%
Direct Farm-Gate Purchase Price -> 33%
Neighborhood Grocer Commission -> 15%
Driver Compensation & maintenance -> 5%
Spoilage & Buffer Allowance -> 3%
Value Saved -> 44%
Total cluster hardware CapEx is $16,000 ( $6,000 EV trike + 5x $2,000 solar coolers).
The payback time is 6 months if each cluster handles 19.5 tons/month
Revenue Potential estimates based on annual fresh vegetable consumption:
Sudan alone: $620M
Pan-Sahel Scale: $4.6B
By placing cooling chambers in grocers, the retail floor acts as a distributed warehouse, eliminating real estate overhead and middleman margins. we are the only ones allowed to procure vegetables to the chambers we can do this because we don't sell the cooling chambers, we simply give the grocer a 15% percent cut of the revenue.
Slashes rotting crop methane by averting 98 tons of spoilage per cluster annually
Decrease post-harvest loss from 45% to below 10%
Decrease food prices
we have mapped 14 peri-urban farmer cooperatives in Jebel Aulia and Tuti Island and pre-screened 32 retail Dukan grocers in Omdurman ready to host our first batch of cooling chambers
I bootstrapped a manga distribution business to revenue. I then led marketing for a fintech startup (Tutipay), a year ago I crossed the Egyptian desert to build a fintech company and I secured the previous minister of finance as advisor and a previous CTO of 2 other previous Sudanese fintech attempts as our CTO and 2 other cracked engineers, I failed to raise in time because it was sketchy legal wise, now working on this.
I'm very confident that i can do what it takes to build this in a financially sustainable way
feel free to contact me: awabaltayib@gmail.com