A competition for students that rewards innovative sustainability solutions, the Wege Prize recently honored Claudine Kamanzi and her FruiFresh colleagues with the first-place honor in 2024 for a charcoal cooling system designed to preserve fresh produce without the need for refrigeration.
The Rwanda-based team developed an innovative, affordable charcoal cooling system that uses evaporative and energy-efficient charcoal cooling facilities crafted from locally available materials to keep tomatoes fresh without refrigeration or electricity, reducing spoilage and helping relieve food insecurity, according to a news release.
The produce-saving system earned FruiFresh the winning spot in the 2024 Wege Prize, securing the team $30,000 and the ability to refine the prototype design and successfully build the charcoal cooling facility. Currently, Kamanzi and her FruiFresh colleagues are working with small rural farmers and produce-sellers in Rwanda, helping them keep their tomatoes fresh and reduce spoilage without refrigeration or electricity with FruiFresh’s charcoal cooling system, the release said.
Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Mich., organizes the Wege Prize, an annual competition to work with higher education student teams from across the nation and around the world to advance their agricultural, environmental, waste, hunger and other compelling solutions to vexing challenges in sustainability. Participants vie for $65,000 in total cash prizes while helping show the world what the future of problem-solving looks like.
Gayle DeBruyn, sustainability officer for KCAD, said the Wege Prize started as a collaboration between the college and the Wege Foundation to form a design competition.
“Together, they decided to pursue a competition that would require students to be interdisciplinary and work across colleges, because that is the whole premise around collaboration — a complicated systems approach to solve bigger problems,” DeBruyn said. "… [and] this design competition [is] based on really challenging, complex systems, issues that students define as the problem they want to pursue.”
Students build their own teams and then follow the design thinking process and methodology set out in the design brief, DeBruyn said.
Judges are just as diverse as the teams, DeBruyn said, adding that from soil scientists to material scientists, business folks, experts in manufacturing, “this diverse group of judges coaches the participants through the process, making recommendations for advanced research and exploration.”
Claudine Kamanzi, lead of FruiFresh, said one of the team’s most memorable Wege Prize experiences was conducting surveys in different markets to validate their idea.
“Wege Prize opened us to think far,” she said, adding after making it through the first phase, the team was encouraged to keep going. “We keep saying, ‘This is our beginning. We have to keep pushing.’”
In a livestream of the awards ceremony, Colin Webster, a learning content manager with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, summarized what led the judges to choose the FruiFresh team for first prize.
“Something that really impressed us as judges was we loved that they discovered this real need,” he said. “They’ve built a working prototype and their solution benefits so many people and farmers and the people, of course, who will eat this produce. Plus, they’ve researched the cost with local farmers to work out exactly how much people would be able to pay for storage.”
At the awards ceremony, Kamanzi, a student at Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, represented her team.
“According to Food and Agriculture Organization], agriculture employs 70% of the Rwanda population and contributes 27% of the GDP of the country,” Kamanzi said. “Unfortunately, 27.5% of annual postharvest losses are being lost due to lack of proper storage facilities.”
Kamanzi introduced the audience to Jane, a Rwandan farmer, saying that as a tomato farmer and vendor, 40% of her tomatoes are lost weekly to tomato deterioration due to lack of proper storage.
“I’m not just talking about Jane, however,” Kamanzi said in the livestream. “There are 240,000 tomato farmers in Rwanda. Research has shown that 50[% to] 60% of their production is being lost at every chain. This is a very big issue contributing to malnutrition as well as greenhouse gases.”
The FruiFresh team’s solution is called The Charcoal Cooler.
“The Charcoal Cooler is a natural evaporative zero-energy cooling chain and is able to keep tomatoes without deterioration for up to two weeks,” Kamanzi said. “It has the ability to reduce the temperature up to 9-10 degrees Celsius using materials available locally.”
After Kamanzi’s presentation, the judges asked questions about FruiFresh.
“One of the questions from the judges,” DeBruyn said, “was asking why the tomato was the focus of this system. It’s Rwanda’s highest-value crop, Kamanzi replied. The judge then asked what would be next and she said collards and cabbage, meaning they are already thinking ahead to what other crops they could use this technology for in Rwanda.”
Although the cooling system was designed for sustainability in Kamanzi’s community, it has worldwide implications as well.
“I imagine this is an approach that might work for rural communities,” DeBruyn said. “Those in subsistence farming who are working hard and suffer food loss could benefit. Certainly, communities in an off-grid environment could benefit.”
DeBruyn says Kamanzi and her team can inspire people with their grit and tenacity.
“And there’s a deep need for those qualities in their community,” DeBruyn said.
