Saving Grains 301 GmbH

The social enterprise Saving Grains 301 GmbH was founded in 2019. The company drew on the founders’ experience from their previous work at the United Nations World Food Program. In view of the still widespread malnutrition and poverty, their entrepreneurial goal was to develop a model that is scalable and not just a one-off improvement. As a sustainable solution to high food losses and the unjust structure of the value chain – both of which are strong drivers of poverty – Saving Grains focuses on the entire value chain: Producers and their crop yields, aggregators as middlemen, industrial buyers and their demands in terms of quality and traceability. The company is based in Berlin and has a subsidiary in Accra, Ghana.

Over 200 million smallholder farmers in Africa sell their grain at dumping prices mostly during the harvest. High crop losses due to insect damage and improper storage further worsen their economic situation. Saving Grains addresses both of these issues with a practical and comprehensive approach. Firstly, they offer hermetically sealed transparent grain bags with integrated sensors. This improves storability and therefore not only allows the grain to be sold at a more attractive time, but also enables quality control and traceability. The second component of the award-winning approach is an app. This gives connected traders, known as aggregators, direct access to industrial buyers. This allows significantly better revenues to be achieved. By allowing small farmers to participate in the increase in revenue, their income also increases by up to 50 percent. Training to improve grain storage and quality assurance and the provision of financing are flanking components of this holistic solution, from which women in particular benefit.

Saving Grains will use the prize money to further develop the app for selling the grain via an online platform, primarily to industrial customers. Last but not least, the app also allows for transparency of sales and revenues. The project already successfully implemented in Ghana is also to be extended to Kenya in the near future.

(c) Saving Grains

Learn more about Saving Grains