Fruiti cycle

Fruiti-cycle is a social business with the mission to eliminate post harvest losses in vegetables and fruits in the distribution chain, more especially in developing countries.

Our first product development is an electric tricycle powered manually by cycling. It has a detachable low tech refrigerated storage unit to prolong the shelve-life of fruits and vegetables during transportation. It is designed to eliminate post-harvest losses in fruits and vegetables currently standing at 45% according to FAO (2016). The losses are due to poor handling, poor storage and poor means of transportation. Currently the most common means of transportation are bicycles and motorcycle contributing to 70% of the fleets to the market delivering fruits and vegetables. These means are affordable and can easily be accessed by the local farmers, but the problem is that a farmer riding a bicycle can only make one trip a day in a distance of 1-30km, he can only carry between 10-60Kg at a time, due to bumpy roads and poor packaging and storage 10-30% of his produce goes to waste during transportation before reaching the market. This situation has made middle men to take advantage of the situation and offer transportation services which at the end reduces the income of farmers. The big trucks on the other hand cannot access most rural areas because of low population or poor access roads especially during rainy seasons.

With Fruiti-cycle a farmer can carry up to 300kg of produce at a time, he can make 1-5 trips to the market within a distance of 1-50km giving him the ability to conveniently reach further markets everyday. With the electric power system, he can conveniently offer door to door sales of his produce to the immediate consumers hence eliminating middle men. The low tech refrigerated storage unit uses evaporative cooling system powered by solar making it environmentally friendly and most importantly prolongs the shelve-life of the fruits and vegetable on transportation and also detachable to be used within the market during retail.

Fruiti-cycle has an after sale service SMS phone application system to help fruits and vegetable farmers have access to market information about prices and locations to increase market accessibility.