Shotej (fresh) Tag.

A huge amount of food gets wasted prematurely in the upstream supply chains in Bangladesh before it even gets into the hands of the consumer. This is because most of the food supply chains in Bangladesh don’t have cold chain storage. As a result, the produces experience different temperature based on weather, storage condition, and vehicles. This ultimately makes the expiry time of the fresh produce unpredictable and indeterminable resulting in massive food wastage in the process.

To reduce this, I’ve created a project called Shotej (fresh) tag or fresh tag. The tag records variable temperature near the produce at a regular interval giving real-time expiry date data to the user.

This will enhance the decision-making ability of a supplier or distributor who will now know what to do with their products, whether to sell it or store it in a different cooler place.

Whether it is waiting in the dock or traveling through a non-temperature monitored truck the perishable food produces Bangladesh go through a varying degree of temperature change. This temperature change makes it impossible for supply chain stakeholders to determine the freshness condition of the product through visual inspections alone. Furthermore, lack of cold chain storage facility, structural and financial limitations make food wastage a common scenario in Bangladesh.

So, as a result, a huge amount of foods gets wasted prematurely in the upstream supply chains in Bangladesh. The food and agriculture organization of UN (FAO) estimates that each year, approximately one third of all the food produced for human consumption gets wasted and out of which 38 % of the food wastage occurs in Asia equivalent to 0.6 G-tons of food consisting of perishable foods like cereals (rice, wheat), vegetables and fruits.

Shotej (Fresh) tag aims to stop this food wastage by pinpointing and letting the stakeholders know the exact time when a product is going to be spoiled by calculating the surrounding varying temperature and humidity at a regular interval thus reducing food wastage and carbon footprint in the environment greatly.

We have categorized our customers into two segments within Bangladesh. 

These are:

The Public sector and the NGOs:

This target group that is the governments and NGOs like USAID wants to remove food wastage in the food supply chains. They have sufficient control over the supply chain stakeholders making these entities a perfect target group for our product Shotej tag. So this target group can buy the product from us at bulk and then place the tag in places where there is significant food wastage.

The Private sector:

These will be the superstore's retailers and grocers who have sufficient control over the supply chain and thus would be able to place shotej tag with the food that they want to source. We can add cloud and app ability depending on the demand from these customers as they would want to have an overall visibility of the food that they are sourcing

The values that these customers can get:

1. Save money by reducing food wastage.

2. Create value addition with their products for their customers because of the health and safety issue.

3. Implement FEFO (First Expiry, First Out) inventory system for their produce.

Shotej Tag is an inexpensive freshness indicator for perishable produce which will reduce premature food wastage by indicating when the food is going to expire. The expiry date and freshness count will change dynamically depending on what temperature the food is currently on. For example, if the product is experiencing high temperature near docking station at about 40 degrees Celsius it will indicate that in this current temperature the produce will expire within 1 day. The stakeholders will also get a warning through blinking LED lights. By knowing this information, the relevant stakeholder can take the appropriate decisions about what to do with their produce. 

So ultimately it would reduce food wastage of the developing nations and thus in return save the environment from a massive carbon footprint. 

How it works: 

The shelf life of most perishable products depends heavily on the surrounding temperature. 

Shotej (Fresh) tag records this surrounding temperature of the product with the help of a temperature sensor and then calculates the amount of time it will be fresh in that particular temperature in the micro-controller. The calculating equation will be, => % freshness consumed = (100/ t s0°C ) x Q10 T/10 x time. Here only Q10 will be different for different perishable products as it is defined as how much the rate of reactions with the particular product increases with every 10-degree Celsius increase. So there will be options within the tag to switch between different perishable vegetables and food. And different editions of the tag will be made with the different sectors of products like vegetables and flowers. The battery of the tag will be a 9-volt lithium button and its lifetime will vary depending upon the amount of use and temperature. 

 The result will be shown in days and hours in a display screen as output. There will also be green and red LED light indicators which will light up depending on the freshness of the produce. (Green if the produce is fresh and red if the product is close to the expiry date). The technology behind Shotej (Fresh) tag product is simple, primarily without any cloud or app service making it inexpensive, easy to use and ready for the marginal food stakeholders who usually have no experience of using technology. However, we can integrate cloud, IoT and app capability to the product if the market and target group demands it.

In Bangladesh, there are products and businesses that work towards reducing the post harvest loss by implementing a cold chain storage. But more often than not, even if the the solution is inexpensive they are unable to provide a complete cold chain storage for the products. 

Shotej tag takes an innovative approach to this existing problem by informing the relevant stakeholders about the condition of their product so that they can take necessary decision about what to do with their product which wouldn’t have been possible before.

We are keeping the product very simple by not including any cloud services thus making it cheap and suitable for the markets in the developing nations which suffers the most from the food spoilage both in terms of money and environmental damage. So an approach like this, is unique and innovative to the developing Bangladeshi markets and can vastly reduce the post harvest loss to a minimum level. 

The best way to reduce post harvest loss is ensuring a complete cold chain storage for the produce, but until we can do it in a cost effective way for the developing nations, Shotej (Fresh) Tag can be an inexpensive way to reduce the post harvest loss.  

The reason why this solution can address the problem is because it will enables the relevant stakeholders to take appropriate real time decision based on the their product condition. It will empower stakeholders to do something about their produce loss. 

Recently we successfully did a market research on the farmers and distributers of a village in Bangladesh. In this prototyping phase of the market research, we mainly determined whether or not distributers would change their decision based on the information that will be available to them through shotej tag. We specifically aimed to find this information out because the successes of our product would solely depend on whether customers can make informed and educated decisions based on our product. So we manually provided them with the data about their produce and they changed their decision about what to do with that produce based on it. (whether to store it in a cooler temperature or transport it in another way). However, there were still some aspect of the procedure that they fully did not understood. Based on that, we are thinking about setting up training sessions for these distributers and farmers as part of our start up project.

So as mentioned earlier with the previous questions, we have developed the prototype of our project and performed market research to understand the needs of the market. The next phase would be to develop minimum viable products for the pilot project.

The funding required for the MVP stage is directly coming from Carbon Footprint Challenge championship that we won in June, 2018 with Shotej Tag in Zurich, Switzerland.  Apart from this championship, I have also participated in other start up and idea based competition, like Gist Tech I where I was one of the 109 semifinalists.

Limited potential customers:

Since the tag has to be used in every stage of the food supply chain, that means the owner of the tag has to be an entity who has sufficient control over the supply chain making the actual customers of the tag limited. And then these customers like NGO and government have to actually like and use the tag in the food value chain for our product to work and become commercially successful. That makes our business very dependent on these particular target group that we identified. And we so we have to identify more viable target groups and potential customers for our products so that our business does not become solely based on these target groups. And even though our target group has been set taking this challenge into considerations, there are risks involved as not converting those potential target group into actual customers may result in lack of growth for our product.

Security Concerns: There is a chance that one of the stakeholders may cheat the next supply chain stakeholders by resetting the tag to show extended expiry time to sell their produce.

For the limited potential customer problem, we can aim to directly reach the distributers and suppliers with our product. But in order for us to be successful in this approach this target group has to be trained and made aware about the potential benefit of using our product.

For security concern problem, we can implement a tag pass codes for setting up sensor profile, starting and stopping tag by giving additional command in the micro-controller. But that would mean additional cost with key pad installations and a more advanced micro-controller.

4 people.

Hello I am Saadman, an agriculture innovation enthusiast from Bangladesh. I have completed my bachelors from Bangladesh University of Professionals. Right now, I am working as an officer in BRAC SDP which gives skills training to the underprivileged people of Bangladesh. Both through my work and study, I have found that the agriculture and food ecosystem of Bangladesh is the sector that needs the most innovation and improvement. And that is why I am excited to work in this field in the future with my own project Shotej Tag.

But having me alone with an idea won’t be enough to bring it to life, that’s why in my team I have some tremendous financial and technical experts.

Firstly, we have Afnan Ahmed Akash who is a 4th year undergrad students studying in electrical engineering from CUET.  He is handling all the technological aspect of the product with their expertise on programming and engineering.

The we have Zubayer Hossain and Sheikh Mohaimen Hossain who are respectively the financial expert and the supply chain expert of our team both studying in Bangladesh University of Professionals. 

Consultation with Tiger IT can help us determining the appropriate strategy for our project and how to go ahead with it in the market. It can also help us with the IT part of our project. Further the consultation can solidify our project about the future strategic decisions that we have to make. Overall it will help us to get most of out of our business plan.