SPEAKER_01: 0:36

Hello, this is Nico. We are talking about cold chains powered by mini grids today. My guest is the cold chain super expert Bast Hetterscheid. Bast works at Wageningen University on cold chain development. Over the last years, he has worked in various cold chain projects of development organizations in the global south. He is one of the lead authors of the white paper Beyond Stylus: Strengthening Nexus Collaboration of Power Food Systems with Off-Grid Solar, recently published by Gogler. And uh today, Bus, we're not talking about standalone solar, we're talking about mini-grids. Bus, what is your experience? Are cold rooms working in rural Africa generally?

SPEAKER_02: 1:26

Oh, good question, Nico. If you look at cold room development in Africa, you see a mixed result. Like two years ago, I was in Kenya at the Friends of Narrowie at a small community, and they had like a solar-powered cold room for green beans, and it was working fine. They were supplying to the export value chain, and that worked fine. But on the other hand, there are also a lot of white elephant projects, as we call them, and white elephants are stranded assets which are placed there with good intentions but do not deliver the impact as desired. And also wrote a small article about those white elephants, indeed.

SPEAKER_01: 2:06

Yeah, how many of those are out there? Probably grant funded to some extent, but just sitting idle somewhere in the rural areas not being used, right? Yes, I can say something.

SPEAKER_02: 2:18

So if we look at the stranded assets, nobody's proud to report on them. So it's not an exact science that we can say it is precisely so many, but we are counting and it's above 400 in East Africa at the moment. Yeah, with some known case studies, for example, you have maybe less cold room, but that are cold tanks for dairy in Ethiopia. Over 50 are empty in the rural areas, placed by development projects.

SPEAKER_01: 2:48

Wow, all right. What went wrong? Like where where did they make the mistakes that led to these idle infrastructure?

SPEAKER_02: 2:54

Yeah, I can mention a couple of them because we have done research into many of these empty cold rooms, and there are kind of a couple of underlying reasons. One of them is, for example, there's no demand on the market for a cooled product. So the end customer of the product is not demanding a cold product or is not willing or able to afford a product that is cooled. On the other hand, we see issues with, for example, the narrative of developing cold chains. Like a narrative that is often used is that it can reduce food loss and waste, and then we target the first value chain, which we find with a lot of food loss and waste, which is often a seasonal product like tomatoes, and then we place a cold room there. But tomatoes is typically a product which you can harvest green and then bring suitable to the market in crates, for example. So there are competitive ways of preserving the product, and I think it's often not fully known the complexity around cold chain development and its business model, which is hampering the development in a sustainable way.

SPEAKER_01: 4:00

Yeah, but well, usually these cold rooms are not just placed out there arbitrarily, right? So usually there is some planning process behind it. And I guess that people are also looking into the cold chain and into the business models, and they probably also talk to off-takers. Why is this still happening?

SPEAKER_02: 4:24

Yeah, I can name a couple of reasons. And one of them is imagine you're in a project which is driven by the need to invest in cold rooms, and that is your only kind of target. Then there is a bias in believing that the business case you're building is correct and that the cold room will work. Often they forget to analyze competitive technologies which can be also put in place. Going back to the tomato case, for example, it's more often economically viable to build a greenhouse technology and extend the production season of tomatoes and deliver in such a way the tomato later to the market. But if that kind of solution direction is not in the narrative of your business modeling or the development project, then it's kind of forgotten in a way. So that is a mistake we are often seeing.

SPEAKER_01: 5:16

Yeah. Now making the link to mini-grids, mini-grid operators, mini-grid infrastructure. Well, in many cases, mini-grids are the power supply in rural villages. Now, when you look at the business case, would you rather look at where do I get electricity and then add a cold room? Or would you rather say, well, let's look at where the demand is, where the market is, where actually cold rooms make sense and then ask a mini-grid company to come in and provide electricity, or a standalone solar system company, whatever.

SPEAKER_02: 6:01

Yes. It's certainly more of the second option you're describing, so that you're looking into the market. And there's another dynamic which is relevant as well. It's like when do products need to be cooled? So if you, for example, consider mangoes, bananas, these are typically products which ripen after harvest. So you can also cool them a little bit later than on farm. Well, for example, green leafy vegetables, they need cooling almost within an hour after harvest. So you can also see that the supply chain configurations will be different if you can wait, for example, 12 or 18 hours until cooling, because then you can work with more centralized units. And where do you need decentralized units? That is where the crop needs cooling quite soon after the harvest. That is, for example, with green leaf vegetables, but also with fish, for example. So in the paper beyond silos, we have also reflected on the different kinds of agricultural value chains and where you would typically expect investments in more rural areas or more into urban areas or more centralized places where there can be an accumulated investment. So what we described in uh the white paper beyond silos is kind of how the configuration of supply chains look like, and where you will see that some crops need decentralized investment, and the other ones will be more like assembled or gathered in more central place, which is more logical. And the energy system follows after that. But that is my agricultural bias. I have to be honest there as well. I will first look into the agricultural value chain and then look at the energy source. And I have to be honest here, and it may not sound the nicest, but we also look at, for example, diesel generators as a solution. So that is in the spectrum of solutions we are considering, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 7:54

Of course, yeah. So now you have already touched upon various potential crops or products that need to be cooled. Can we just go through some of them, some categories to provide a little bit of an overview for our audience, which is typically rather from the energy space and not from the agricultural space, of what opportunities there are. And in case of crops they already know that exist in their communities, like what could they potentially do and how they need to approach the subjects? Let's go through the different products. Maybe we start with the real agricultural products. You already talked about green leaves, which need immediate cooling basically within an hour. What about potatoes, for example?

SPEAKER_02: 8:42

Yeah. Oh, interesting question. And let me address both the green leaf vegetables and potatoes. So if you look at the green leaf vegetables, which are typically the leaves of the vegetables, and from a preservation perspective, they need cooling almost immediately. But you can also dry them. Another dry them, and that's currently the solution. So if you want to develop cool chains, then you have to look at the market needs. And if there is a market for the fresh leafy vegetables where people are willing to pay for better quality or extended shelf life, that is what you can often find in more organized retail hotels where they have a demand catered to like a mid to higher segment of the market. As the product can be dried as well, that is often a perfectly fine preservation methodology. But there you also have to consider the nutrients might be gone as well. So, how healthy is the product? So there is also that development angle to it, which is more into the nutrition. So, if we look into potatoes, and let's take the example of Kenya, there the most popular variety is the Xiangi. And the Xiangi is a potato which is notoriously known for not being storable. So it can only be stored for three weeks and not for extended times. So, even though we have good intentions to store it, you should first consider to change the agricultural system to have varieties which are bred to last longer. And if we look into the potato sector, these typically develop when processing capacity is placed. So let's say that a big fast food chain is saying, like, hey, we need so many tons of potatoes every day, then they will build a factory to process potatoes into French fries. And what they need is to optimize the factory. So, what they're gonna do, because potato is a typical seasonal product, twice per year it's harvested in Kenya. Then they build potato storage places to make sure that the factory is optimized. So you see that it's triggered not directly by the demand, but by the investment in such a factory.

SPEAKER_01: 10:53

Yeah, we always need to look at the supply chain basically and see where the off take is, and then um build the cold chain according to the type of product that the off-taker would take. We are seeing that some companies are making the mistake of basically trying to bring rural products directly into retail markets and do the retailing themselves, which means that they have two bottlenecks on the one hand on the supply side, and then on the other hand on the off-take side. It would be better usually to go with an off-taker which takes any quantity you deliver, right? Even if the price may be a little bit lower. What is your experience here from the agricultural sector?

SPEAKER_02: 11:41

Yeah, interesting that we touch upon this point. And a point I made at the Gox fee as well in Nairobi is that in agriculture we separate between push and pull markets. And push meaning that something is produced, but you don't know if there is a market for it, so you push it to the market and hope somebody will buy it.

SPEAKER_01: 12:01

Which usually generates very small margins, right?

SPEAKER_02: 12:04

Yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty there, let's say it like that. And imagine you're you are a farmer and produce something and you don't know if it will sell on the market, then it's also really hard to make an investment. And if you have the opportunity to store products in, for example, on Cold Room, then it's a gamble if the market will be there in the future. Well, if you look at pool models, then you know the market will be there, and you may need some time to make sure that you deliver at a certain time the market wants it. But there you know that the quantity is taken off for a certain price, and that will also make that you can make certain investments or certain decisions to store your crops. It doesn't mean to say that the push model is not working because there are examples of cooling as a servers or logistic service providers being offered, for example, in Nigeria, so it can work in certain cases, but if we look at a meta level, then we see that most coal chains, 95% develops based on pool markets and not on push markets.

SPEAKER_01: 13:08

Yeah, so one advice that you would give to our audience is look for the pool markets, because that is the safer bet. And especially if this is not your core business, you may want to minimize your risk, and after all, the pool market would be the way to go. Uh now we've talked about agricultural products a little bit, about vegetables, about leafy uh vegetables. What about fish? What about milk? Animal products?

SPEAKER_02: 13:37

Animal products, yeah. That's another interesting one. Because if we take if we take an holistic view on it, animal-based products are actually regulated by food safety regulation, which require temperature management. So uh if you compare it to fruits and vegetables, the culture and development is more driven by a commercial narrative to preserve them or a nutrition perspective, for example. But in animal-based products, there's really hard regulations on preservation and making sure that the food is food safe because that's all about food safety. So there's temperature management, which requires, for example, the cooling of dairy or the milk, which is just from the cow, within, let's say, four hours after the milking. And then you see that coal chains establish already in informal value chains with informal farmers, and also in the fish value chain, you see that quite soon after, for example, the delivery of fresh fish, which is kept alive in buckets of water, for example, with sweetwater fish, that coal chains are being established, for example, freezing the fish for a certain market. So that's often happening close to the farm because these products have to be cooled quite rapidly after their harvest. A little bit strange word in this context, but uh on the other hand, you have value chains like the cows and, for example, the polluty, and there you see that it's often brought alive to the market in informal value chains and being prepared on the market for the consumers. And for a chicken, for example, if you do that, then you have approximately four hours between that you butcher it and that you have to consume it if you have it in the warm value chain. And what you see in countries like Kenya, but also like uh a decade ago in Indonesia is that as soon as food safety regulation is not in place, because it's in place anyway, but better enforced, and the food safety issue becomes a higher concern of governments, then you see investments happening in the formalization of the value chains. You see slaughterhouses being developed, and as soon as you have a slaughterhouse, then the slaughterhouse needs to be cooling, that's space cooling, and you need cooling of the product because after slaughtering it has to be cooled within two to four hours to make sure that uh the product is food safe, and then the whole value chain should be arranged accordingly. So it's a quite different dynamic than the fruits and vegetables.

SPEAKER_01: 16:08

Yeah, okay, so animal products driven by food safety regulations. That's your main point. Now, are these food safety regulations existing on the African continent, or are they still to be developed or put in place?

SPEAKER_02: 16:26

Um food safety uh standards, let me start by the standards, they are established by uh organizations like FEO. So they are existing. Internationally, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:39

Internationally.

SPEAKER_02: 16:40

Uh then it's about adoption in national policy. That has often happened as well, because uh almost every country has food safety regulations. However, the enforcement is the next kind of step. Like, do you want to enforce all the food safety regulations? There isn't trade-off because if you are implementing food safety regulations, the products can become more expensive. Because if you put uh, for example, uh animal-based products in a coal chain and formalize it from an informal value chain which brings the products to the market and being slotted there, and then it has suddenly has to have like a butchery and a cold chain and formal selling places, the product becomes more expensive. So there is a trade-off between product affordability and the enforcement of food safety regulations, and there's an important public goal there because it's food, the food safety element needs to be in place, and everyone should have the right or has the right on safe food. But yeah, there is a trade-off between having it in place and enforcing it, and there are sensitivities around it.

SPEAKER_01: 17:51

Yeah, there are also conflicting interests. On the one hand, you want to have low cost proteins for your rural population, for your lower income population, which probably speaks against a strong emphasis on making cold chains an obligatory rule, and then on the other hand, of course, you have the health argument, which of course speaks strongly for the implementation of regulation. Um yeah, interesting. So now these animal products. Why would anyone go and bring animal products or animals from deep rural areas into markets which are far away? Or are then these cold rooms rather for local consumption?

SPEAKER_02: 18:50

Uh good question. I didn't think of that, uh Nico, to be honest. Uh nice to see that I can make you think. That is what we have seen in America, in Europe, in China, in Asia, in Latin America. So it's kind of that development narrative that the rural areas often come kind of at a later pace into the picture. So they are facilitating the cold chain to feed cities, for example, because there is where they can potentially unlock incomes by selling their produce at higher prices or more volumes. And I have to be honest there, then rural is maybe a little bit neglected in that way or forgotten about it uh directly, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 19:48

Now, who is supposed to operate such a cold chain? Like when I talk to mini-grid companies, they keep telling me, well, electricity, generation, distribution, and supply is already a very complex business. We don't want to do more than that. If you want productive use and cold chain would fall under productive use of electricity, then please find someone external to take care of it. How much effort is it to run a cold room or like even manage a whole cold chain and who should do it?

SPEAKER_02: 20:21

Yeah, there are different business models. So we once made a paper and kind of distinguished 10 kind of business models in cold room uh operations, but also cold chain, so the brother, not only the room, but also the transportation, for example. Um, maybe interesting to take a step back and look at the first wave of energy access coming into the domain of productive use of renewable energy. There you saw that companies who bring the technology, so the solar-powered cold room or in cold room connected to a mini-grid, offered cooling as a service to kind of help farmers to store their produce and then the farmers could sell it. However, you saw that the uptake of those models was quite low, and that comes back to that push and pull market. If the farmer doesn't know that he will sell its produce, then it might be a challenging task to say you have to pay for the storage here and hope that there is a market in the future. So, what you saw is that the companies shifted from offering cooling as a service, which still exists in some markets. I have to be transparent there as well. It's also working in certain settings, but they have been shifting towards more trader model where they are buying or they are finding a market and then saying to the farmers, we can buy anything you're supplying, because we know that we have offtake in the market, and you see that happening, for example, with mangoes, green beans, so more the export type of crops, but also more and more on the local crops, so the leafy vegetables which find their way to the organized retail, for example. So you see a shift from those companies who delivered the productive use of renewable or the productive use technologies towards becoming a trader as well. But there's questions to that as well. Do you want to be in a trading position as a technology provider? So you also see that specialized companies do develop who are into the trading already, and then they rent in cold room or they uh buy in cold room or they lease them. So the cold room I started the podcast with in Kenya was leased by a company from a productive use company who supplied it. The difference between trader and a logistic service provider is that the logistics service provider doesn't take ownership of the product. So he just transports, he or she just transports the product. And that is also a model which is in development at the moment and happening more and more. You see.

SPEAKER_01: 22:58

Okay, how does that model work? Like who contracts the service provider then? Is that the large agro manufacturer who needs input and then hires someone to get the input from rural areas?

SPEAKER_02: 23:15

Yes, indeed.

SPEAKER_01: 23:16

Okay, that's how it works. And and then this um logistics company is also also um owns and operates the code rooms, correct? Yep, yeah. I see. So that could potentially be an interesting partner organization for mini-grid companies, right? If the mini-grid company knows, okay, well, we have a lot of mangoes here in our area, and outside of this area in the country, there are not that many mangoes. So we are basically in the mango hub of this country. So, well, if a mango is delivered to the market, it should come from here. Then they could potentially contact either the processor, well, processor meaning basically the company which packages the mango and exports or or sells it to the wholesale market that is then further on selling to the retail chains. Or would they rather go and contact the logistics companies? I guess the logistics companies would be difficult to find, wouldn't they? Um yes and no.

SPEAKER_02: 24:20

Uh, and they're often hybrid models. So you see that, for example, the traders take care of kind of the the first mile, so getting the mangoes to the packing stations and the first instance of cooling. But then, for example, if mangoes tip or example is mangoes are transported to, for example, the Middle East or to Europe, then you use logistics uh service providers which are shipping it to the port, from the port, to another port. That's all logistics service providers kind of shipping further downstream. Then you see like a more hybrid model in which the first mile is taken along by the trader and the rest is logistic service providers.

SPEAKER_01: 25:00

Well, the trader is to a certain extent also a logistics manager, right? Because in Africa, distances can be quite large to bring a mango to the capital city uh can even easily take a 1,000 kilometer truck ride. That is logistics, I would say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now that is the logistics company or manager that I was thinking of, rather than the downstream one. Yeah, but like what is your experience? Are these kind of processors actively looking for supply? Are they open to new vendors? Is it easy to get into that kind of market?

SPEAKER_02: 25:41

Um if it was easy, then it would have already been done, right? That's always the Okay, that's the economist speaking. Because then it uh naturally happens. Uh now I'm um sorry, can you repeat the question?

SPEAKER_01: 25:59

Now the question is um looking at the opportunity from a mini-grid company's perspective, how straightforward would it be to establish an off-take of rural products through a cold chain? What does it need after all? Would the trader say, okay, I establish the cold room here because I know you have a reliable electricity supply? Or would they approach the large-scale offtaker, the wholesaler or the processor of the goods somewhere in the city, to basically transport the products from the rural areas to the city, or would the mini-grid companies be required to do it themselves?

SPEAKER_02: 26:44

Yeah. All of the above, probably, and that is what is making it difficult. Now, what we can see, for example, in the dairy value chain is that as soon as you have a processing facility, they will do backwards integration because they need to optimize the utilization of their processing facilities. So they will go into the areas where there's dairy production and then look how can we source the amount we need to process. So that's maybe less connected to the energy source in that sense. But that will be one of the considerations as soon as they say, like, hey, these are the areas where we can potentially source sufficient milk to send a truck to collect and tank truck to collect all the dairy. And then they will look into what does it make to make this investment, you know, the the tank itself, but also uh fresh water supply, energy that are all considerations you have to make. For other products like fruits and vegetables, we also have to consider that, for example, green leaf vegetables is not a product which is permanently there on the ground. So if you grow one season of salad, next season you can do carrots or potatoes. So that also changes over time, and that's also needed as crop rotation. So what we are often seeing is that the products which are growing are maybe sometimes not the products which are needed most in the city or where coal chain investments are related to. So, for example, in Argentina, where we worked, there we saw that typically salads were made around the city, harvested in the night, brought into the markets in the morning, and then they realized it can be made cheaper 500 kilometers from the city. So they moved it, that went into rural development, those agricultural lands, which is called the green belt around the city, and then suddenly they needed coal chains because the production shifted to another area, which formerly didn't produce the salads. But because the transport distance went from, let's say, 25 kilometers to 500 kilometers, it suddenly needed the infrastructure to support the preservation of the vegetable. That's where we saw a rapid development of cold rooms happening.

SPEAKER_01: 29:02

But that I guess was a centralized investment. So they basically went out, bought land, farmed the salad themselves, and then set up the cold rooms to bring the salad to the city center. But now I think what we're rather talking about is collaboration with smallholder farmers, um, which farm in their own gardens or so, which of course can coordinate among each other in cooperatives or other types of organizations, and then also can produce volumes, the volumes that may be required to uh satisfy a large scale off taker. Especially as, like if you are looking at mini-grid companies, they usually don't have just one mini grid, but they have tens or hundreds of mini grids across certain areas that can really cover a wide, wide range of farmers. And now if you add all those products. And sum them up, so to say, collect them all. It can be reasonably large amounts of food products or or animal products or like vegetables or whatever, agricultural products.

SPEAKER_02: 30:12

Yep. Now it's certainly interesting development of that energy access being there. I think it will not be the driver to establish in culture, but will certainly help to lower the cost of making the investments in certain areas, including the off-bridge solutions, which are also uh being there. I think the thing I described in Argentina is indeed large scale. For smaller scale, you often see that the current value chains are organized through middlemen, like informal middlemen who are trading and also managers, for example, which would not invest into cold rooms, would they? That's the question we are now asking ourselves if they would be the candidates to do or not to do that. Often it's difficult, especially in informal settings. But what you see is that if you have a courtroom, then you want to make the utilization as high as possible. So you want to utilize it throughout the year. And if you go to a single farmer, they are bound to kind of the seasonality of production, unless you go to a volume or a coordination between multiple smallholder farmers which can coordinate the production in such a way that you can utilize the cold room for an extended time. So it requires some thinking and organizing on that side to make sure that the viability of cold chains is taken into consideration next to that market element. And what we are currently seeing is that middlemen are transforming themselves in certain crops to play that role of being a logistic service provider, put a pre-cooling unit near the farm so that you cool the product rapidly and then transport it towards the city in a way. And that also has to do with, for example, a question on access to finance. Often these traders deal with a lot of finance, but also they deliver the input product to the farmers. So although sometimes they are seen as not so friendly, that's important.

SPEAKER_01: 32:17

Yeah, they have a bad reputation usually, right? But um, if they now start adding value by providing coal chains and cold rooms, then that would also improve their reputation significantly, I guess.

SPEAKER_02: 32:30

What we are seeing now is that they are kind of spot traders, so they will go to an farm and just say, like, what is the lowest price I can get these products? But if that transforms to like a model where you see that they say, like, hey, you can supply me with anything and I will make sure there's a market for it, that also transforms the narrative in which they are operating. So that can also help.

SPEAKER_01: 32:55

Yeah, or even forward trading, right? Where they say, okay, I pay you right now to deliver next year or something like that. Contract farming and things like that. Contract farming, these kind of things. Yeah, that is what it should potentially develop into, right? That would help rural development a lot, I guess. Uh, but I would like to link back to what you said earlier. You said where there is a need, a demand for cold rooms, electricity is not the driving force, right? You can always deploy diesel generators or or like standalone solar, whatever. So, why is it not being rolled out in the large scale? Is there still no profitability there? Or do people not see the opportunities? Where's the gap?

SPEAKER_02: 33:40

Um I think if we look back to how cold chains developed, for example, in Europe. I don't say that they should develop in the same way in Africa, but if we look into the development historically of cold rooms, then when did cold rooms develop? That's all only 60 years ago. So that's kind of the last agricultural development, one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology placed into the agricultural value chain. And we saw that happening just after the Second World War in Europe when there wasn't a time that the incomes of people multiplied by a factor of four or five, then they started to change their behavior in purchasing. They shifted from daily buying at wet markets to weekly buying at, for example, supermarkets. I'm not saying it's a good trend or it's just an observation. That is how it happened in It saves time after all. It saves time and it's buying for convenience. People have more money to spend, so they can spend a little bit more on out-of-season products, on quality products, and that is also kind of the business model or narrative for the cold rooms. And if you look into the animal-based products, because that is a different kind of cup of tea, then it was heavy uh governmental investments in saying like all the meat has to be sold through formal butcheries in Europe. That made that all that cult rooms were developed to make sure that the telechains were formalized to that extent.

SPEAKER_01: 35:17

Alright, if that's the story we are following in Africa, I think we are very close to a very large rollout of cold rooms pretty soon because many of the African countries belong to the fastest growing economies in the world. And the middle class is growing at the same six, seven, sometimes even seven point five eight percent annually, which means that there will be more demand for fresh products from potentially somewhere nearby. And if the nearby sources are depleted, then of course they go more rural, and then cold chains will be required. So yeah, mini-grid CEOs and companies, watch out. There will be more to do for you, even though mini-grid electricity will not drive the development, but you can still participate in that trend.

SPEAKER_02: 36:11

Yeah, certainly. Yeah, I support you in that, and then definitely also making a nuance between different geographies. Often we have a big enthusiasm around one country, and the same enthusiasm is applied in other contexts, and that uh is sometimes questionable. I don't want to stop the party because I think there is a great potential, but the potential is different in each country, and yeah, if we take these underlying developments and the need for farmers to or the desire for farmers to develop or even find in place outside of the farming system and for example work in the value chain, that are all developments which are uh playing uh along in the school chain development uh.

SPEAKER_01: 36:58

Yeah. Which after all means that the pull markets that we were talking about uh earlier, they are basically developing naturally, right? Through the economic growth of the middle class, there will be more pull for certain products, and then there will be for the producers in rural areas, there will be more opportunity to find reliable off-takers that take large quantities that bring rural production to scale and then finally make it competitive with products that are produced closer to the cities.

SPEAKER_02: 37:35

Yeah, I'm fully behind that and also giving a little bit of warning because, for example, in the Netherlands where I'm living, we are depending on seven supermarkets which determine the whole value chain. So that kind of concentration of power also comes with its own dynamics, which have to be taken into account, but it's certainly part of that game uh we are in.

SPEAKER_01: 37:58

That is where government and regulation comes in, right? To bring prices down and to avoid um monopolies and these kind of things. Yeah, great. I think we touched upon a very nice opportunity for our listeners: cold chains in rural areas with cold rooms connected to mini-grids. I think we said that the business model is not finally developed yet, so there's still room for innovation and new players to come in. Maybe even some mini-grid companies want to pick up this opportunity and say, well, let's become a trader of my rural products because I see a pull market here in this, and uh I anyway have basically the direct contact to my local people in my communities. Why don't I just purchase large scale from these and also drive economic development in my villages? And that's by the way, what we are trying to do in Jumema, in Tanzania. We are also trying to do that in Uganda and Volterra. And I know we've had some episodes about this, that some other mini-grid companies are trying similar things. We call this rural industrialization, just to mention that term once again. Our listeners have heard that very often. And uh yeah, cold chains are definitely one way of tackling this.

SPEAKER_02: 39:23

Yeah, really cool and exciting development. Uh and I will follow it closely uh as well.

SPEAKER_01: 39:28

Thanks a lot, Bat. That was uh a very nice discussion. Thank you, Nico, as well. And uh hope to see you soon. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00: 39:35

Bye bye. This episode of the Mini Grid Business has been brought to you by Insta, your one-start chat for sustainable minigrids. For more information on how to make mini grid work. These are our website.