The Alabaster team is a group of vibrant young people that seeks to reduce the post-harvest loss for fruit farmers through cold technology and data analytics. The food storage subsector in Nigeria has a huge gap to be filled in the Agriculture sector pipeline, so they came up with a product called Kipitfresh.

70% of what is produced in Nigeria is lost due to inappropriate post harvest processing and storage techniques. However, this problem is the core reason for Alabaster’s solution. Their team is made up of experienced personnels from the University of Greenwich London, Lancaster University, Oxford University and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, they started by launching fruit bars where customers could consume organic fruit juice & smoothies.

Overtime, their biggest challenge was sourcing for quality fruits resulting from difficulty in  purchasing fruit produce that have high prices due to the role of middlemen. To mitigate this challenge, Alabaster conducted research among farmers & retailers, conceptualized Kipitfresh, and raised 100,000 dollars to launch the solution that uses cold-chain-as-a-service, temperature monitors and electronic wallet to store and distribute fruits.

Their revenue model is split into cold storage atr fifty naira per 25kg fruit crate and cold distribution for 1000 naira per 25kg fruit crate. This Kipitfresh’s model proved to be efficient and sustainable. That is why they are seeking to raise a million dollars to build a demand forecasting software that allows fruit farmers to project the number of fruit crops to plant per season and to expand our services to other fruit communities

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