PUNE: With a third of their vegetables and fruits going waste due to spoilage, farmers are turning to start-ups such as Ecozen, ColdStar, Promethean and Coolify for providing access to solar and hybrid-powered cold storage solutions. Ecozen Solutions, started in 2010 by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Devendra Gupta along with Vivek Pandey and Prateek Singhal, offers solar-cum-hybrid cold storage to farmers in rural India.

Currently finishing the pilots with this hybrid solution in East Africa,

plans to launch in India in 2015, after graduating from MIT. "We were awarded the most innovative business idea by the US Department of Agriculture, quoting a

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prize money. This is an IT-enabled solution, wherein a farmer with a smartphone can activate the storage container and set the temperature," said

.

is set to launch in the

rural belt next year.

"The product works on solar power and uses thermal storage as the energy back-up. The cost of the solution depends on the commodity to be stored. Normally, a fruit farmer should be able to recover the cost within three years and earn at least twice of what he is currently earning," said Gupta. Since horticultural commodities are perishable and there is no storage, farmers are forced to sell their produce at throwaway prices during harvest time, said Gupta, adding that there has been price fluctuation of more than 200 per cent in certain commodities."We aim to de-risk the farmer against these fluctuations and also play a bridging role in the national food supply chain." The co-founders have invested about Rs 15 lakh so far in Ecozen, which has a revenue target of Rs 20 crore by 2015-16. Similarly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Rajat Sethi, currently pursuing his MBA, has co-founded Coolify as a new-generation cold storage solution, targeted to serve the back-end of the fruits and vegetable supply chain in India.SethiRslakhSethiCoolifyUP-Bihar"In 2015, in the first year of launch, we plan to get a minimum of 500 storage units on ground, and thereafter scale further. We want to introduce a payas-you-use model for the farmers. This is a $15 billion opportunity just in India," Sethi added. According to ColdStar, which supplies refrigerated storage to multinational companies and big farms, which in turn take it to farmers to retain quality of perishable produce, more than 18 per cent of India’s fruits and vegetable produce worth Rs 13,300 crore goes waste annually due to lack of or poor cold chain facilities in India."Developing an integrated cold supply chain can save up to Rs 30,000 crore annually and significantly reduce wastage of perishable produce," said Shagun Kapoor Gogia, founder-director of ColdStar, launched in 2010, adding that the company is seeing about 15 per cent increase in demand ever year. ColdStar services more than 40 locations through a network of large-scale storage hubs and connects them with its transport network. The venture has been incubated by Tuscan Ventures, which has set up a VC fund focused on logistics."Since 2010, we have witnessed around four organised players taking shape and existing smaller players scaling up. Over the next four to five years, we see large public warehousing and cold storage and transport services being built and the reach being expanded evenly across sectors and geographies in the country," said Sameer Verma, principal at Tuscan Ventures. India is the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables, with output of about 200 million tonnes every year, but the total cold storage capacity at present is only about 23.6 million tonnes, according to ValueNotes Data Research.The industry report adds that the cold chain industry has been growing at 20 per cent CAGR and will reach $10 billion by 2017. Like fruits and vegetables, milk too spoils quickly without immediate access to cold storage. Promethean works in this area, offering rapid milk chillers to large dairies such as Amul and Mother Dairy besides regional players such as Chitale in Maharashtra."We offer our products to these players, who in turn install them at the milk collection centres in the rural areas. This enables farmers to deliver more high quality milk to dairies, thus increasing their overall revenue," said Sorin Grama, co-founder of Promethean Power Systems, which became active in India in 2010. The milk chillers work on electricity and have a panel to store energy.