Active Packaging Sachets

India is the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables but still, about 40% of the fresh produce is lost before it reaches the consumer. This is costing the country $12 Billion every year and contributes to 2.6 Gtons of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Globally, about 1/3rd of food produced is lost before it reaches the consumer, and the economic losses towards that is $1.3 Trillion and contributes to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year. 

We have developed an active packaging sachet (Patented) that can extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. The product comprises natural plant extracts that can activate a defense mechanism within a fruit or vegetable to retain freshness and minimize microbial attack at ambient temperatures. 

When the volatile active ingredient is released it slows down the ripening rate and restricts microbial growth of fresh produce without any cold storage/ cold supply chain and harmful chemicals (toxic). 

We work with small and medium-sized supply chain players in India who are transporting 50 to 100 tons of fruits and vegetables daily over 4 to 15 days of transport at ambient temperature. These customers don't have any access or capital to use cold supply chain/ cold storage and face significant economic losses every single day. 

Our product helps them to transport fresh produce at ambient temperature within their current supply chain practices. Our product provides 3 to 4x ROI for these customers (ie for every $1 they invest in our product, they get $3 to $4 on their revenue) 

The leadership team comes with deep expertise within the agriculture and food industry. As a company, Design thinking is part of our DNA - we stay and learn deeply about the customer's pain point. During our product development as well, our R&D team stays closer to the customers to test the product iterations and receive their feedback to move forward 

We currently work with 200+ pilot customers and commercialize 4 products in the market. We have also done product pilots in Kenya, the Philippines, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Based on this decided to pick "Growth stage" 

We are at a juncture towards scaling our innovation to multiple states within India and to other developing countries. I strongly believe Solve's mentorship on scaling up our innovation and leadership to build our team strong. 

Solve's objective of solving the food losses in the global food supply chain aligns with our company mission. This program would be a great opportunity for us to go deeper on our opportunity. 

Our product controls the crop's internal biochemistry pathways rather than controlling anything on the external atmospheric interactions (temperature control or ethylene absorption). Since we solve the root cause of the problem, our product can extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by 40 to 60% at ambient temperature. 

We have built a back-end R&D platform called "Rapid Prototype Platform" that uses bioinformatics, data science, and biotechnology to develop customized solutions for each fruit and vegetable. Our process starts with market research, which involves spending significant time at the sourcing and destination market to understand the customer pain point. We break down the crop into multiple biochemistry pathways to understand which pathways are responsible for spoilage - we use bioinformatics to discover the right ingredient that can counteract these pathways to reduce the spoilage  

Our solution can create an impact from various aspects: 

• The product can reduce fresh produce spoilage by 80%, thus reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from food loss
• Our product works at ambient temperature, eliminating any need for cold storage and cold supply - thus reducing the climate impact
• Our product can support supply chain players to move from air travel to sea travel - thus reducing the climate impact and also reducing the transportation cost for the customers
• Our product can provide 3 to 4x ROI for our customers 

We are tracking the following metrics: 

• Volume of fresh produce preserved 
• Amount of Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduced 
• Economic value increase for our customers 
• Company top-line growth and profit growth 

Our core technology uses the science of plant defense mechanisms. Every plant has its inbuilt immune system that can fit against external stress (temperature, pest, etc) and there is a communication system (volatile cues) between two plants that helps activate the crop's defense mechanism. 

The product replicates these volatile cues between the two plants to activate specific defense mechanisms within a fruit/ vegetable to extend the shelf life at ambient temperature during transport and storage 

25 people

3.5 years

We strongly believe in having a diverse team to solve this food loss problem to bring various perspectives. We have several processes/ initiatives to source diverse talents for the team and have policies to not to discriminate anyone against their background

Its a direct product sale to B2B customers through direct distribution and through 3rd party product distributors

We built our backend R&D platform to develop new products and we have already built the product for 13 new crops - we will be launching the product for each fruit and vegetable to scale our top-line revenue. Our current product has a gross margin of 55% and we're working to increase that to closer to 70% - this would help us break even by the end of this year.

We have built systems and processes to scale with very minimal human resources and we work with third-party manufacturers to produce our product (asset-light model) - this would help us scale without investing heavily on cap-ex.