How solar power is fighting Nigeria’s billion-naira food waste crisis

Log in or create a free account to get started.

Read History Go to My Account Log Out Enhanced by Google Energy How solar power is fighting Nigeria’s billion-naira food waste crisis The tomatoes arrive by the crate, red and slightly bruised from the ride in from the farm gates outside town.

Listen to this article Share The tomatoes arrive by the crate, red and slightly bruised from the ride in from the farm gates outside town.

A worker in rubber boots weighs them on a scale bolted to a concrete slab, taps the numbers into a phone, and wheels them into a room cold enough to fog his breath.

Outside, the sun that will pay for all of it beats down on a field of blue solar panels wired into a 90-kilowatt-hour battery bank, enough, the engineers here say, to keep the compressors running for four days even if the sky never clears.

This is Adonai Foods & Fresh Produce, a cold-storage operation on the border of Abuja and Nasarawa State, and it sits at the center of a quieter, more mundane version of Nigeria’s energy transition, one measured not in gigawatts of grid capacity but in kilograms of pepper that didn’t rot.

Nigeria loses a staggering share of what its farmers grow before it ever reaches a plate. National estimates for postharvest losses in fruits and vegetables commonly run past 40 percent, and in a country where inflation has kept food prices near the top of household budgets for much of the past three years, that waste is not an abstraction.

It is money leaking out of some of the poorest households in the country, one spoiled crate at a time.

A small but growing network of entrepreneurs is betting that the fix does not require Nigeria’s chronically unreliable electricity grid at all. Solar-powered cold rooms — cheap enough to run, in theory, that a market trader selling tomatoes can afford to rent space in one for a few naira a day — are spreading from Jos to Zamfara to Sokoto to the Niger Delta.

The model leans on a mix of Swiss development financing, Nigerian engineering labor, and a smartphone app that tells a farmer, in real time, how many days a bag of peppers has left before it turns.

Whether this scales into something that meaningfully dents Nigeria’s food-loss numbers, or remains a scatter of well-run pilot sites, is still an open question. But the people running it have already learned the hard lessons: that solar power is the easy part of this business, and convincing a farmer to trust a stranger with his harvest is the hard part.

Lawrence Anebi did not set out to become a solar engineer. He trained as a mechanical engineer with a focus on renewable energy and HVAC systems, then added coursework in regenerative agriculture almost as an afterthought — a decision that would end up defining his career. Lawrence Anebi

Anebi now manages Adonai Foods, and he traces the company’s origins back roughly a decade to a much smaller operation in Jos built to solve one specific problem: farmers watching their produce rot because they had nowhere to put it between harvest and sale.

“We recovered huge losses from post-harvest losses from farmers,” Anebi said, describing the pattern that first drew the company into cold storage. Vegetables and meat were the worst hit, anything without a long shelf life, harvested in volume during peak season, with no buyer lined up and no way to hold it.

The initial answer was straightforward: build a cold room, let farmers store their produce until a buyer showed up. But Anebi and his team quickly discovered that storage alone didn’t solve the underlying problem.

A farmer with a full cold room and no market access was still stuck.

“Even storing them is not the final solution,” he said. “The sales point is also a solution.”

That realisation pushed the company toward a partnership with BASE Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that has spent more than two decades building financing structures for low-carbon technology in the developing world.

Through a program called Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant, developed with the Swiss research institute Empa, BASE supplies the software backbone — an app called Coldtivate — that lets a farmer check produce in and out of a cold room, track shelf life, and, increasingly, sell directly through a built-in marketplace, similar in concept to an Amazon or a Jumia storefront but sized for a few crates of peppers rather than a warehouse.

BASE describes itself as working across 68 countries, crediting its broader cold-chain and renewable-energy programs with creating roughly 2,500 jobs, saving on the order of 130 gigawatt-hours of electricity, and helping more than 160,000 people gain improved access to cooling.

Those are global figures, not numbers specific to Jos or to any single Nigerian site, and BASE itself is careful to separate program-wide totals from the performance of any individual cold room.

What BASE has attributed specifically to its work with Nigerian partners is a report that 494 farmers gained access to cold storage through the collaboration, with associated food losses cut by more than 62% and farmer incomes rising by nearly 44%.

Those figures trace back largely to testimonials from the Warri region in the Niger Delta, where Adonai got its start, rather than to the newer Jos facility, a distinction worth holding onto, because the temptation in stories like this one is to let the most flattering number travel further than the data behind it actually supports.

On the ground, Anebi is more interested in the mechanics of trust than in the statistics.

“We are trying to also manage the trust of farmers to change their narrative that if you bring produce into the store, it will get spoiled,” he said.

That narrative, that cold storage is a trap, not a solution, is, in his telling, the single biggest obstacle the business has faced, bigger than financing, bigger than equipment sourcing, bigger even than Nigeria’s electricity problem.

The reason solar matters here is not primarily environmental. It is operational.

A cold room that runs on diesel generators is a cold room that goes dark whenever fuel runs short or prices spike, and in Nigeria, where the national grid delivers power on a schedule best described as unpredictable, “the generator didn’t start” is one of the most common ways a farmer’s stored produce ends up spoiled anyway, the exact outcome cold storage was supposed to prevent.

Adonai’s answer was to go all-in on solar, despite the upfront cost. The company installed a 90-kilowatt-hour battery system at the Jos site, sized to run the facility around the clock for up to four days without sunlight.

“It is a massive initial cost, but the long run is worth it,” Anebi said. The payoff, in his account, isn’t just a lower electricity bill — it’s a credibility argument he can make to a skeptical farmer. Constant, visible, reliable power, with no diesel fumes and no excuses about fuel costs, is itself a sales pitch.

The company charges as little as N29 per kilogram per day to store produce, a fraction of what it would cost to run the equivalent space on generator power, according to Anebi, and cheap enough that a smallholder selling a few crates of tomatoes can justify the expense rather than dumping unsold stock at a loss.

Adonai is also piloting a solar-powered refrigerated van, intended to solve a related problem: produce that survives the cold room only to spoil in transit to market.

“The engine and the cooling system are all on solar,” Anebi said of the vehicle, which the company plans to offer as a pickup service for farmers who register through the app.

Cold storage on its own is, in a sense, the least interesting part of the business model. The interesting part is what the company has had to build around it — training programs, a fleet of traveling engineers, and a workforce pipeline that recruits national youth service corps members as apprentice technicians — to make the technology usable by people who have never had a reason to trust a refrigerator with their livelihood.

If Anebi handles the engineering, Kefas Luka handles the harder job: walking into farming communities and convincing people who have been burned before that this time is different. Kefas Luka

Luka works as an agricultural extension officer for Adonai, and his role sits somewhere between agronomist and salesman.

He trains farmers on timing their planting and harvesting, pushes organic methods that fetch better prices, and inspects produce quality before it’s ever allowed into the cold room. But most of his time, by his own account, goes into something closer to community diplomacy.

“Farmers, I’m very sorry to mention that sometimes it’s very, very difficult to accept change,” Luka said.

His entry point into a new community typically runs through the village head, who gathers interested farmers, usually vegetable growers, since that’s where spoilage losses hit hardest, for an introductory meeting conducted largely in Hausa, the regional lingua franca across a part of northern Nigeria where, Luka noted, more than 250 distinct languages are spoken.

From there, it’s a slow process of what he calls needs assessment: listening to farmers describe their problems before offering any solutions, and being honest that some of what they’re already doing is working fine.

The problems Luka hears about are strikingly consistent, and they map onto Nigeria’s broader agricultural economy far more than they do onto any single company’s cold-storage pitch. Seed costs are high, and Luka has to make the case that cheap seed produces cheap yields, “garbage to garbage,” as he put it.

Fertilizer is expensive and sometimes simply unavailable. Transportation is unreliable enough that produce can spoil in a parked vehicle before it ever reaches market. And prices swing wildly day to day, leaving farmers with no way to plan.

The problem Luka describes with the most evident frustration is middlemen, traders who claim informal ownership over produce as soon as it arrives at market, effectively setting prices on behalf of farmers who have no leverage to push back.

“It is the middleman that will determine the price,” he said, “instead of the farmer to determine the price.” Part of his pitch to farmers, accordingly, is basic financial literacy: keeping records of every cost, from land preparation through harvest and transport, so a farmer actually knows whether a sale represents a profit rather than simply accepting whatever number a trader offers.

Even farmers who agree to store produce at Adonai aren’t always happy customers. Luka said some accuse the company of the same pattern they’ve seen from other outside organisations, extensive engagement and training, followed by offers to purchase produce at prices farmers consider too low.

His response is blunt: the company can’t buy high and sell low and expect to survive. “It’s not tenable anywhere in the world,” he tells them.

On the buying side, Adonai has run into a mirror-image problem.

Anebi said the company has tried to build institutional buyers in Abuja — hotels, restaurants, event centers, pitching higher-quality produce grown and stored under controlled conditions.

The pitch has mostly failed so far, not because the produce isn’t good but because most buyers already have suppliers and are reluctant to switch, and because Adonai’s higher-quality product commands a higher price that some buyers won’t pay, opting instead for cheaper, lower-quality stock sold informally in local markets.

“We will not relent,” Anebi said. “We will keep on pushing.”

Who actually uses the Cold Room The demographic picture Luka and Anebi describe cuts against a common assumption about who benefits from agricultural technology in Nigeria.

Both estimated that women and young people make up roughly 90 percent of the people actually moving vegetables through markets in the region, women dominating tomato and fruit-salad trade, young men more visible in commodities like watermelon, with older farmers largely staying on the land and delegating market activity to their children.

Anebi put the share of people for whom this work represents their primary source of livelihood at around 70 percent.

That pattern showed up in miniature at the Jos facility itself.

Margret Otache, a small trader who buys ice and chilled water from Adonai to resell locally, described a roughly 50 percent cost saving compared to what she was paying before, along with a more practical benefit: ice made without the chemical additives some competitors use lasts longer before melting, meaning she buys less frequently and loses less product to a bad batch.

“There’s no day you come here and you won’t see water to buy,” she said. “You won’t see ice blocks to buy. They’re always up to date.” Margret Otache

At the operational level, the app that BASE and Empa built is doing more of the routine work than any single manager could. Mark Blessing, who runs the cold room’s daily intake, walks through a process that has been digitised down to a few taps: a farmer arrives with a crate of pepper, Blessing weighs it, logs the crop type and quantity into the Coldtivate app, records the harvest date, and charges by weight and by day —N35 per crate of pepper for a single day, in his example, calculated automatically once the weighing scale gives him a number. Spoiled produce gets turned away at the gate rather than accepted and stored.

Adonai’s Jos facility has only been operating for about a month, though the company’s broader history stretches back roughly a decade, beginning with a site in the same city before an earlier, digitised version of the cold-storage model launched in Warri in Delta State in 2023.

The company has also built systems for other operators in Zamfara, Sokoto, and elsewhere — sometimes retaining ownership and charging a usage fee, sometimes building a system for a client who pays for installation and then operates it independently.

That expansion has forced Adonai to think about itself less as a single cold-storage business and more as an installer and trainer for a technology that other people will eventually run themselves.

Anebi described a workforce strategy built around apprenticeship: national youth service corps members and interns brought in specifically to learn installation and maintenance, with the explicit goal that some will leave after their service year and start businesses of their own rather than staying at Adonai.

“The installation job is not just a job for one person,” he said. “The market is huge.”

The bet embedded in that strategy is that solar cold storage in Nigeria won’t scale through one company building hundreds of sites, but through a trained workforce spreading the technology faster than any single operator could manage alone — closer to how solar-panel installation businesses have multiplied in other parts of the developing world than to a conventional franchise model.

Anebi’s own next project, a biodigester intended to generate electricity from spoiled market produce that would otherwise be discarded, suggests where he thinks the technology goes next: closing the loop between the waste this business is trying to prevent and the energy it needs to prevent it.

Adonai’s work sits inside a larger recognition effort. BASE Foundation, its Swiss development partner, won the 2026 Zayed Sustainability Prize in the energy category, a UAE-backed award that has now recognised 139 winners across its history and has reached more than 411 million people, with roughly $7.2 million distributed annually across five organisational categories plus a global high schools track.