Reducing Food Waste

An estimated one billion tons of food is wasted each year. In India, the pre-consumer loss of high-value nutritious produce is estimated as high as 50 percent for fresh food, contributing to broad food insecurity and malnutrition-induced stunting in more than a third of children. This project seeks to give Indian smallholder farmers access to food preservation technology, which is normally too expensive and risky to own individually. The team designed, built and tested affordable dryer and cooler prototypes that were scaled over a year of product development to meet farmers’ specifications. Next steps include evaluating economic benefits of the technologies and scaling potential to other agricultural products and regions with India-based partners through market surveys, pilot studies, business model development and recruitment of India-based entrepreneurial partners to incubate ventures for cooling and drying units.