Food Innovation Nervecenter

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Each year, 1.6 billion tons of food worth about $1.2 trillion are lost or wasted. This represents about one-third of the total amount of food produced globally. That's ten-times the mass of Manhattan Island. 

In our communities in Nigeria, between 45-75% of crop harvests (especially fruits, vegetables and tubers) end up uneaten/wasted. Most livestock meat is unsold post maturity. This means expensive vegetables, meat; and reduced dietary micronutrients and protein. In contrast, over 90 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty, go to bed hungry every night and lack access to the 75% of fruits and vegetables being lost to waste.

Here, food loss occurs at all steps in the food value chain and is largely a function of uncoordinated production, processing, storage and transport of food from farms. 

The major drivers of food loss and waste are:  lack of awareness of the issue and of possible solutions, inadequate supply chain infrastructure, supply chain efficiency efforts that do not focus sufficiently on food loss and waste, weak collaboration across the value chain and insufficient regulations.

Summary:

Today's food losses make our food systems unsustainable by driving superfluous food production.

To solve the food loss and waste problem, we're building digital nervous systems to connect us to the food we grow and design. We're taking traditional farms and food distribution channels; and giving them FoodNerves so they can self-coordinate and act more intelligently to eliminate food loss.

Our solution, FoodNerve oS aggregates different means of searching, trading, brokering, bartering  and recycling food together (traditional radio phone-ins, toll-free contact center service, online food listings, food to fingers app and commodities brokerage) into a single voice searcheable platform and payment system for rural farming communities and urban consumers

FoodNerve oS:

a. helps rural farmers reduce food loss and increase harvest profits by linking to bulk buyers via toll-free customer call support/radio phone-ins,

b. helps urban consumers locate nutritious foods on urban/peri-urban farms nearby through user generated data analytics (online food listings, an urban food apps),

c. 'mainstreams' food research (seeds, time to plant, harvest, purchase contracts) to locals through dedicated food radios/think tanks,

d. shapes food loss culture through web, T.V, radio, festivals content,

e. Reduces foodwaste through crypto voucher partnerships with restaurants/foodbanks.

Summary:
FoodNerve oS is an integrative data analytics, distribution, research and cultural operating system devoted to minimizing food losses.

Food systems in Nigeria are fragile. They are marked by cyclical variations in demand, supply and foodprices. The markets are disorganised such that a community may be experiencing food unavailability whilst 20km away, another community may have a glut. 

Today, we are linking smallholder rural farmers in Southwest Nigeria to buyers through phone brokerage. Farmers call in with estimated harvest size, and we find  bulk buyers/processors to take up entire harvests. 

We started out by immersing our teams into the daily lives of food system stakeholders ( farmers, preparers, processors, petty traders, cook, consumers, policymakers) over the course of six months and conducted in person interviews to assess the food loss challenges and brainstorm culturally acceptable tech solutions we could deploy.

Six months ago, we began building a dedicated facility to house the Food Information Nerve Center. Our platforms are being created with our stakeholders inputs to ensure easy adoption. In nine months, we should have a fully functional toll-free call service providing hourly information on state of food supply, foodwaste, demand, loss and prices across different small holder farms and farmers' markets in Southwest Nigeria.

Summary:

We are co-creating with rural farming communities and urban consumers in Southwest Nigeria.

Today, Nigerian farmers cultivate 4times the land required. Farming is unsustainable as forests are converted into farmland despite increased food losses.

With real-time data, farmers now know which crops to cultivate, when to harvest, how to minimize losses during processing, where to access storage and who will buy yields prior to harvests.

Our multifaceted solution makes food systems sustainable through effective coordination of present harvests. 

Summary:

90 million poor Nigerians can be fed more sustainably without increasing food production because they can now access greater portions of the 75% crop harvests which in previous years would have been wasted.

Our innovation is:

1.  Market creating:
 Our platform products and services enables a new category of consumers (low income consumers) within our test market access healthy food on a regular basis.

FoodNerve oS enables urban consumers locate healthy food near them ( from local vendors, from neighbours with surpluses ). By digitising and democratizing food location information, food that would otherwise be wasted gets eaten.

2. Growing farmers out of poverty
FoodNerve oS provides knowledge of seeds, agricultural advisory through radio and web content to rural/periurban farmers to help adoption of practices that will ensure a better yield. Also, we will be offering standardized, blockchain+based contracts in local languages, legal support and online payment system. It reduces the hassle and eases the paperwork, barriers which have existed to lock out uneducated local farmers.

 3.  Built on appropriate (existing and emergent) technologies:
We are installing biosensors on rural farmlands, connecting farmers to bulk buyers via radio powered call exchange. We will be connecting urban consumers to food actors via a combination of web, phone apps, toll-free call centers and in a few months via natural language processing A.I. phone and web assistants. We are also exploring seamless, blockchain based processing and transportation that will be powered by fractional Fee payments.

By broadcasting to food value chain actors in local languages and integrating a toll-free support into our solution, we are teaching and receiving instant feedback on best practices, crop/animal diseases, storage techniques and challenges each locality is facing in real time.

We will be deploying artificial intelligence to assist local farmers make intelligent well informed data driven  growing and sale decisions and mainstreaming biosensors (Nano-sensors) across farmlands to provide real time data on humidity, temperature, soil pH and  micronutrient levels.

We will also transition to seamless automated food processing/transport. Together with farming communities in Nigeria, we are co-creating a visual prototype of a digital supply chain app. We expect to integrate with payment systems, fulfillment infrastructure and voice searchable database within the next 180 days.

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