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PROBLEM

Every year globally, millions of tons of food is lost at post-harvest and storage levels due to inability of farmers to immediately sell, properly process and safely store their surplus produce. This leads to significant economic damages especially for smallholder and medium sized farmers who produce most food in the world. In developing countries post-harvest food loss is one of the major contributors to hunger, poverty and migration. Other major sources of food loss are millions of tons of highly nutritious side-streams of food industry like pulp from juicing process and spent grains from brewing process etc. ending up as animal feed and biomass.

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THE CHALLENGE

Due to limited resources, most of the farmers around the world do not have access to commercial processing and storage facilities to preserve and store their produce. In developing countries, lack of knowledge, energy and road infrastructures limit the options for the farmers. The challenge is to find low-cost and sustainable technical solutions that can adapt the conditions at the source of surplus food, utilize the available resources and facilitate farmers and food industries to preserve and process their surplus food.

SOLUTION

In collaboration with farmers and food industry, UpFood utilizes its proprietary drying technologies to preserve and upcycle the surplus produce into high quality nutritious and shelf stable dried food ingredients right at the source. Our technologies produce upcycled ingredients at competitive costs with very small CO2 footprint while meeting the international food safety standards. UpFood provides upcycled ingredients to food retailers and to food industries as per specifications for direct utilization as ingredients or as new sources for extracting proteins, fibres, natural colors etc. This will contribute to meet the growing demand for plant-based food products.

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Our Proprietary Technology Features

Solar-Hybrid Drying System

Patent pending Low cost, off-grid and automatically controlled drying process
CO2 neutral drying process producing high quality dried products like industrial dryers. Variable capacity suitable for both small and large farms. Tested by Danish Technological Institute.

Portable Modular Drying system

a complete HACCP certified drying processing unit (from washing to dried products)

Distributed upcycling: Can be deployed at any location along food value chain and easily moved to another geographical location after a given fruit/vegetable harvest is over.

Drying round the clock and all weather especially for locations with high humidity/ rain.

Waste-Heat Drying system

Utilises industrial waste heat mainly.

Very low Capex and Opex and least CO2 emissions (reduces emissions of existing source of waste heat)

A sustainable alternative to large scale industrial drying: ability to dry very large quantities.

Wide Product Range

Our technologies can upcycle any kind of Agricultural products like Grains, Beans, Legumes, Fruits, vegetables, Spices, Herbs, Tubers, nuts etc. and biomass like lumber, woodchip and residue plants.

IMPACT

Majority of all food produced globally is produced by 500+ million smallholder farmers. They comprise a large proportion of the world's poor living on less than $2 a day. Due to limited resources, their post-harvest food losses are up to 40%.

Our proprietary low cost solar-hybrid and modular drying technologies will help smallholder farmers to reduce their post-harvest food losses by efficiently preserving and processing their produce. The high-quality dried food will be contamination free for their own consumption. For their surplus produce, UpFood will also provide market access and a source of income from the produce that is otherwise lost.

UpFood aims to establish food upcycling units in rural areas to process unsaleable harvest from farmers and also provide jobs for local population. This will eventually help in creating vibrant rural economies.

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COMMITMENT TO SDGS

At UpFood our ambition is to innovate solutions that contribute in achieving the target of a better world for people and planet by 2030. Our solution is directly related to SDG 1, 2, 3, 8 and 12.

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Partnership and Collaboration

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