The country’s small-scale farmers—who produce 98 percent of Nigeria’s fruits and vegetables—face many agricultural challenges. The lack of effective distribution is a major problem and leads to a high rate of post-harvest loss which is posing food security threat to the country. We are using our food connection technology to effectively address this problem. Soupah Farm-en-Market Limited runs a B2B marketplace that connects rural small-scale farmers to urban retailers with end-to-end supply chain traceability, thereby sustainably cutting wastage and making foods affordable for consumers. Our business model is simple
we aggregate the required produce every evening such as tomatoes, peppers, onions, banana, pineapple, etc of the informal retailers and leveraging this precise information to efficiently source produce directly from farmers every morning which we deliver to retailers with a QR code on the delivery crate that can be scanned and will link to a url that explains all the information about the food (where we got the produce from, harvest time, for how long it had travelled, etc).Until we started, farmers’ largest problem has been access to market due to rural-urban distance. Currently, farmers work with a network of middlemen to connect to market and deliver their produce very early to farmers’ market every morning where vendor retailers buy from and transport to their shops. However, the activities of these middle men on the Agricultural value chain are exploitative as the marginal profit are high, thereby creating artificial shortages that leads to 'unaffordable' foods and urban malnutrition. Nigerians spend 60 percent of their income buying food and the high cost of food reflects the markups from a series of middlemen, before produce finally gets to the consumers. We set out to right-size Nigeria’s food costs by tackling that inefficient and opaque food distribution.Our tech-enabled solution is structuring and expanding domestic market for farmers and retailers to lifts them out of poverty (SDGoal1) while significantly contributing to lower food prices to achieve zero hunger (SDGoal 2) and cutting down post-harvest losses at both end of the value chain (SDGoal 12) as well as reducing the amount of methane emission into the atmosphere (SDGoal 13)
Comments