North America Edition
The Onize Vegetable Market in Imo State has had problems with spoiled produce for a long time; often seeing losses of up to 50% of its produce, leaving growers and traders only marginal profits.
ColdHubs, a Nigerian provider of propane (R290)-based solar-powered cold storage for developing countries, provided a cold storage unit using an affordable, cooling-as-a-service (Caas) servitization model, allowing the market to pay for it based on usage rather than through a large up-front investment. With the installation of the cold storage unit at the market, only 1-5% of the produce spoils, allowing for much higher profit margins.
Each crate stored has a number, which is tracked by a paper card provided by ColdHubs. The storage of a crate is 100 Naira (US$0.27) per night, a sliver of the cost of produce, which can be 20,000 Naira (US$53) for green peppers, for example.
In August, ColdHubs was named by BASE as the winner of the Cooling as a Service Prize, which recognizes outstanding providers of refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment financed by the CaaS business model in developing countries.
Source: hydrocarbons21.com
Photo source: Dreamstime.com
