Award-winning mobile app against "food waste

"Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy" (BASE) and Empa will share the ten million US dollars in funding with the seven other award winners and use the money to further develop an open-access mobile app: The app gives smallholder farmers in India access to sustainable refrigeration options for their agricultural products. As a result, significantly less food ultimately spoils, and farmers increase their incomes.

India is one of the largest food producers in the world, but 25 to 35 percent of the food produced spoils due to lack of refrigeration and other supply chain bottlenecks. Only about six percent of food produced in India currently passes through an unbroken cold chain, compared to about 60 percent in developed countries. This is due to several barriers that prevent farmers there from "feeding" the food they produce into cold chains. These include high upfront investment for equipment, limited access to finance, uncertainties about new technologies, limited technical know-how about refrigeration systems, limited expertise in postharvest storage practices, and in some cases, limited access to electricity.

App provides a lot of information

To address this challenge, BASE and Empa are developing a freely accessible, data science-based mobile app, "Your Virtual Cold-Chain Assistant," to provide smallholder farmers with access to sustainable cold-chain facilities, pre- and post-harvest expertise, and market information. The application will include various data inputs, including weather and climate data, geographic location data, yields of fresh produce, data from hygrothermal cold storage sensors, predicted remaining shelf life of produce, and real-time market prices. This will allow smallholder farmers to make refrigeration decisions based on lifecycle benefits rather than upfront costs; they will have access to easy-to-use information so they can make optimal production and farm management decisions.

The project aims to break the negative cycle of poverty for smallholder farmers in India - while improving food security, reducing food losses, minimizing the impact of food production on the global climate and increasing smallholder incomes by up to 30 percent.

Press release Empa

The "Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge. was launched by data.org in partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and the Rockefeller Foundation. The award aims to address society's most pressing challenges and help people better develop through the use of computers, models, and data science.