Winner – OVERALL category
Sector: Food Storage
A better way to connect food and people
Evaptainers takes evaporative cooling and brings it into the 21st century by employing modern design, production, and materials. By creating a refrigeration solution that runs only on water we have created dependable cold-chain solutions without dependence on costly infrastructure.
With a reliable and easy to use innovation helping to preserve the fresh foods they purchase at market, Evaptainers alleviate consumers’ concerns about wasting hard-earned income on fresh foods. The Evaptainer is also a perfect solution for disaster relief and humanitarian situations, backcountry adventure, and emergency preparedness.
MISSION
To provide affordable refrigeration solutions to address the unique needs and challenges of transporting produce in developing markets.
The team
SPENCER TAYLOR,
CEO
SERENA HOLLMEYER TAYLOR
CSO
QUANG TRUONG
COO
YASSINE MAGHNOUJ
Moroccan Marketing Manager
JEREMY FRYER-BIGGS
CTO
The project
THE PROBLEM
In developing countries, refrigeration is both EXPENSIVE and INACCESSIBLE.
This leads to spoilage rates as high as 45% for fruits and vegetables, and a total loss of $4 billion dollars in Africa annually.
Our company has developed a low-cost, electricity free solution for food preservation. Our first product, the “EV-8”, is a lightweight and collapsible evaporative cooler. It is the world’s first commercializable “zero-energy” (requiring absolutely no external electricity) refrigeration device, ideal for low-income, off-grid areas. Evaporative cooling as a technique has been employed successfully for centuries in products like the Pot-in-Pot refrigerator or Coolgardie safe. Proven to be effective for cooling at the point of production, these devices have been known to triple or quadruple the shelf-life of most produce. Using state-of-the art materials and improved design, we’ve created a more effective and scalable clean energy refrigeration solution, enabling the cold chain to reach farther than ever before.
Innovation for Developing Countries
Our Evaptainers offer a dramatic revamp and modernization of this concept into the 21st century. Our device has a collapsible clam shell design which is both easy to transport and light weight. The secret to its success are the highly efficient evaporation side walls which “sweat” to cool its contents. These walls are constructed from a sandwich of technical materials consisting of a highly evaporative membrane outer layer and a waterproof inner layer. When it is hot and dry outside, the water trapped between the two layers turns to vapor and passes through the outer wall pulling energy out of the Evaptainer and cooling the produce inside. Furthermore, our invention has been specifically designed for industrial manufacturing, making it possible to easily produce thousands (or tens of thousands) of units per day from factories and benefit people on a large scale.