Promethean Power Systems: Redefining Rural Cold Storage, Empowering Farmers
Promethean Power envisions farmers and food processors working together with appropriate, accessible chilling technology to create a more efficient value-chain and generate higher returns for milk. We seek a solution to the problem of inadequate refrigeration in developing countries, which, in India, results in US $10 Billion in spoiled produce annually. While we focus on technologies to advance the cold chain process, we know that technology is only a means to the social change. To maximize our impact, we will sell our chillers through innovative financing to farmers and milk cooperatives to facilitate this empowerment. We know there are two aspects of appropriate technology - we hope to increase access while spurring structural changes in the dairy supply-chain.
About You
About You
First Name
Rajat
Last Name
Gupta
@prometheanpower
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Promethean Power Systems
Organization Website
Organization Phone
+16175128811
Organization Address
T3/T4, Arvind Rachna, Prabhat Road, Lane No. 15, Pune
Organization Country
India, MM
Country where this project is creating social impact
India, MM
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Promethean Power Systems: Redefining Rural Cold Storage, Empowering Farmers
What change do you want to bring to the world?
Promethean Power envisions farmers and food processors working together with appropriate, accessible chilling technology to create a more efficient value-chain and generate higher returns for milk. We seek a solution to the problem of inadequate refrigeration in developing countries, which, in India, results in US $10 Billion in spoiled produce annually. While we focus on technologies to advance the cold chain process, we know that technology is only a means to the social change. To maximize our impact, we will sell our chillers through innovative financing to farmers and milk cooperatives to facilitate this empowerment. We know there are two aspects of appropriate technology - we hope to increase access while spurring structural changes in the dairy supply-chain.
What are the primary activities of your project?
Promethean Power has developed a small-scale commercial refrigeration system specifically designed for chilling milk in developing countries. Based on 3 years of R&D, we have developed a Rapid Milk Chiller (RMC), which takes milk from 35C to 4C in seconds, as opposed to the 3 hours needed by conventional bulk milk chillers. This RMC utilizes a thermal storage battery to store any available energy so that dairies in partially off-grid areas are not reliant on haphazard grid power – the stored energy can power the chillers when the grid is on or off. We installed our first system in Tamil Nadu, India in January 2011 using solar panels, and we have plans to install another ten systems using a small thermal storage system by the end of this year.
Using our technology, farmers in developing countries can instantly chill milk in small volumes after it is milked in villages, when it is most likely to spoil from bacteria. Access to immediate chilling technology will allow more farmers to enter into the organized dairy market, which has topped a US$1 billion market in India. Our research and development efforts are on-going and have yielded important findings into the potential that the milk market has to grow even larger and the type of infrastructure needed to support this growth. We feel that our growth in the past four years and our dedication to this cause will allow us to grow with the dairy industry, and help returns make their way back to dairy farmers
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Our innovation comes from our dedication to developing an appropriate technology that will maximize accessibility and ease of use for farmers in remote areas. Milk is India’s lifeblood and Indians depend on fresh milk for a big part of their daily nutrition. India draws its milk supply from millions of small farmers in villages scattered across the vast countryside. Traditional chillers do not efficiently process small amounts of milk, nor do they take into account the volume fluctuations from flush to dry seasons. The Rapid Milk Chiller that we have developed opens the door for farmers to chill their milk immediately, which makes it taste better and worth up to three times more in the formalized milk market.
We want our technology to equip farmers with the capability to turn their cows or buffalo into sustainable sources of profit. We will therefore encourage individual farmers with larger herds (medium-sized farms milking between 50 and 100 litres per day) to buy our chillers using microfinance loans and other innovative funding sources. If farmers have their own chillers, they will be able to use the added income from their higher quality milk to increase their herds and manage larger sustainable operations. We know that sophisticated changes need to be made to the cold- chain infrastructure in India and this change should come from the farmer at the village level. By targeting the farmer, we are engaging a population that has been previously disregarded, debilitating the growth of the dairy industry and resulting in the massive spoilage of milk at the village level.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for less than a year
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Our technology is ideal for small dairying operations conducted at the village level. Conventional refrigeration equipment designed by and for developed markets is not suitable to Indian conditions because milk is produced by millions of independent farmers and aggregated in small amounts at village collection centers. The majority of village collection centers in India collect less than 500 liters of milk per day. Our appropriate technology targets this untapped and fast-growing market. Fifty-four percent of farmers in India sell their milk either to cooperatives or private dairies. Of the 275,000,000 tons of milk produced in India every year, up to 30% of it can spoil due to inadequate chilling. Incorporating a chilling element allows farmers to salvage more of their product and to have more negotiating power and to get a substantially higher return on their product. Our technology also addresses problems of dairy processors, who incur approximately 20% of their costs in retrieving unrefrigerated milk twice a day before it spoils. Our inclusion of processors’ concerns into our product development contributes to our system’s ability to actively restructure the dairy supply chain. There is a benefit for processors as well as farmers to incorporate our technology into their process.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
Promethean Co-Founders Sam White and Sorin Grama met at MIT in 2007 where, after winning second place in the prestigious MIT $100K competition, they took their share of the $10,000 prize to India. There, they discovered the massive milk market, which at the turn of the 21st century became the largest milk market in the world. They saw that despite this increased production and consumption, the lack chilling technology was prohibiting milk from efficiently flowing from collection sites in villages to the markets. In addition, the profits that farmers were seeing were minimal. Sam and Sorin conducted an intensive market research and human factors study and received interest and letters of intent from the largest private and cooperative dairies in India. They knew that they could develop a market-based approach to the problem of inadequate refrigeration and developed a solar-powered refrigeration unit. After installing two generations of their solar-powered system, Sam and Sorin narrowed the business to include only the RMC, which is less expensive and utilizes less space than the solar system. As a result, the technology is more appropriate for the Indian market and can be delivered to villages faster and be more easily maintained. In 2009, Sam and Sorin added a third founder, Rajat Gupta, an Indian national and recent graduate of Harvard Business School. Rajat leads our operations in India which include developing new business, managing the supply chain and interacting with Indian investors.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
The successes of this venture can be judged from the successful installation of our first prototype in Tamil Nadu, as well as the continued interest we have from our first customer, India’s largest private dairy. Our first installation processes 500 litres of milk per day and approximately 30 farmers. This is typical of the villages in India we will serve. The continued support of dairy processors and NGO’s on the ground ,and their intents to order our system are perhaps the strongest validating claim for the need for Promethean’s refrigeration systems in India. We measure success in the number of farmers that we serve, as well as the amount of money saved from the efficiency we create. We estimate that between 30 and 60 Indian Rupees are saved in transportation costs for every litre of milk. Additionally, trucks are reducing their carbon output by 88 litres of diesel per trip to retrieve 5000 litres of milk. Finally, as more dairies and farmers adopt our technology, we will see a significant curbing in milk spoilage, which can be as high as 30% of the 275,000,000 litres of milk produced. The criteria with which we measure our impact are diverse, but it enables us to know that our product is a solution and not a temporary fix to an inefficient system.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
Fewer than 100
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
Over the next three years, we will scale our manufacturing in Pune and expand our customer base to farmers who can buy our low-cost chillers themselves with innovative financing options. Diversifying our customer base to include collection routes for large dairies and individual farmers maximizes our potential to restructure the current inefficiencies in milk collection. In our first 3 years, we project distribution to 5,000 milk producing villages and almost 100,000 villages within 15 years. We will outfit collection routes of 10-20 villages at a time so that processors can collect chilled milk from every stop on their collection route.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Our major barriers to success are lack of adequate start-up capital to take our prototype and scale it to mass-production. We have continuously refined the design of our system to make it the most efficient and easiest to produce. Our other major barrier is transporting our systems to villages traditionally off of already established collection routes. Additional infrastructural changes need to be made in order to incorporate these into collection routes, but we will work with dairy processors to ensure that new villages can be included in collection routes once they have chilled milk available.
Tell us about your partnerships
Our progress thus far would have been impossible without our partners, who have helped us to continuously refine our system to build the most impactful technology and further our research on the benefits of this technology. We have forged strong relationships with dairy cooperatives and self-help groups in India who serve as constant sources of feedback for our developments. We are currently partnered with India’s largest private dairy, Hatsun, and Srijan, a successful non-profit focusing on female empowerment in rural Madhya Pradesh. As part of a campaign to generate higher livelihoods for women, SRIJAN is working with Promethean to create new collection routes and incite the change that we see possible all over India – the expansion and creation of new dairy collection routes that will generate higher returns for farmers. These operations have huge networks of dairy collection centers that put us in touch with our target users and also validate the market we are pursuing.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$100,000‐250,000
Explain your selections
We have been funded primarily through social venture capital investments from clean energy and social-impact investment firms, including Invested Development, Grey Ghost Ventures, Quercus Trust and Solgenix. Additionally, we have installed our first full system, running on solar power for our first customer, India’s largest private dairy. We have received a verbal commitment from this dairy to purchase thousands more of these systems once we scale our manufacturing operation. Finally, the US government has funded our R&D efforts with a National Science Foundation grant for the purposes of investigating thermal storage properties for refrigeration purposes. Our financial supporters have also been invaluable in advising us throughout the development of our product. Despite these investments in our technology, additional funding would be essential to expanding our social mission. We are currently trying to raise an additional $100,000, which would help our partnerships with NGO's like SRIJAN to create and expand collection routes and to help farmers negotiate higher returns for their better quality milk.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
As the General Manager of our India office, I have implemented the necessary procedures to scale manufacturing of our rapid milk chiller and expand our operations and sales model over the next three years. By the end of 2011, we will have ten units installed. These will be for our first customer, three self-help groups and two cooperatives. Once manufacturing of the RMC begins in significant volume by February, 2012, we will then move to implement a larger thermal storage component, which will mitigate the use of diesel fuel.
Challenges
Which barriers to employment does your innovation address?
Please select up to three in order of relevancy to your project.
PRIMARY
Restricted access to new markets
SECONDARY
Lack of efficiency
TERTIARY
Lack of visibility and investment
Please describe how your innovation specifically tackles the barriers listed above.
Chilling milk at the source with our RMC means that processors will not have to collect milk twice a day, as they do when it is not chilled, a very inefficient process.Instead, they can collect the milk every other day. Transportation is the highest cost incurred by a dairy—aside from the milk itself—and accounts for about 20% of a dairy’s operating cost. Refrigerating milk on-site will also allow farmers to sell directly into the organized market. Currently, if villages lie too far off of a dairy collection route, they will not be able to sell into the organized market because processors will not be able to collect in time. As a result, farmers can only use the milk themselves or sell into the informal market, which will not yield as much of a profit due to the lack of infrastructure.
Are you trying to scale your organization or initiative?
If yes, please check up to three potential pathways in order of relevancy to you.
PRIMARY
Grown geographic reach: Within host country
SECONDARY
Grown geographic reach: Multi-country
TERTIARY
Leveraged technology
Please describe which of your growth activities are current or planned for the immediate future.
Most immediately our growth will take place within India through the increased manufacture of our systems and the training of engineers, technicians and individual farmers to maintain the systems. This training will help us scale these systems to other locations much faster. As we expand, we will be able to take our knowledge of the dairy market and apply it to other markets in South Asia, particularly Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. We have built a strong network of contacts in India, including directors of private and cooperative dairies, logistics companies and manufacturing experts. This network has proved invaluable for our credibility and has helped us to branch out into the Pakistani and Nepali markets already.
Do you collaborate with any of the following: (Check all that apply)
Technology providers, NGOs/Nonprofits, Academia/universities.
If yes, how have these collaborations helped your innovation to succeed?
• We have collaborated with engineering companies like Masterflux and Cooper Perkins to design and produce parts of our refrigeration cycle, which was crucial while developing our prototype. Promethean also partners with professors and PhD candidates from MIT and Harvard for research into further improving our system. Dairies like Nestle, Goa Dairy and Hatsun have been invaluable for constant feedback on our design and for publicity. We are currently working with Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA on a grant from the US National Science Foundation to investigate thermal storage properties. Our partners have facilitated our entrance into the Indian market, and have helped us to operate in an ecosystem which challenges us to serve our customers with the most advanced technology.
 | 44 weeks agoSapna Shahani said: It's nice to read about your initiative, I wish you all the best! about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 48 weeks agoRajat Gupta updated this Competition Entry. |
| 48 weeks agoRajat Gupta submitted this idea. |
