Grace Ashiru
Aiponics, a well-known AgriTech company, is responsible for creating the Hrvst digital farmers’ market. They made it simpler for restaurants and customers to buy local goods.
It has only recently been introduced in Zambia. Still, it already has 79 restaurant partners across Lusaka, support from over twenty farmers of varying sizes, hundreds of early-access users.
Christopher Chileshe is the founder of the company Aiponics. They intend to establish a chain of container farms that will dramatically cut the distance from farm to table while feeding local communities with fresh, high-quality produce, food security and crop diversity. The Hvst marketplace will function as a medium of demand for produce grown on container farms. By integrating with the app and showing the container as a vendor. The team calls this the “vegetable vending machine” model in a playful way.
Chris said, “There has never been a better opportunity to introduce technology and innovation into a market that sorely needs it.” Numerous African regions are currently going through a food crisis, and relying on other nations for one’s food security is fraught with potential peril. Our primary objective is to improve both the quality and diversity of food that is easily accessible to everyone on the continent while simultaneously expanding the capacity of hyper-local communities to ensure food security.
Because it enables farmers to promote their products and sell directly to restaurants and customers, the Harvest platform makes the purchasing and selling process affordable and easier for sellers and buyers. It currently provides a robust variety of features that are intended to assist and enable all end-users to make the most of the platform’s capability.
The capability of an integrated POS system and order administration, fleet management and performance data are all incorporated into the vendor app. These capabilities make it possible to conduct cashless transactions utilizing alternative payment methods such as credit cards and mobile money.
Driver App: lets you see orders that have been given to you, plan the best routes, and verify deliveries. Users can book future orders through the Customer mobile app, purchase crisp food from a fascinating range of local sellers for pick-up or delivery at predefined locations, and obtain information regarding the health benefits of the foods stated in the app.
Aiponics crew intends to incorporate third-party courier services into the broad collection of functions already available on Harvest. This will allow them to boost the delivery rates to farmers who farm on a small scale, who may have difficulties with fulfilment.
Aiponics is pleased to confirm that Curtis Madden has joined the company as the chief executive officer to aid in accomplishing this goal. He has a wide range of business experience, such as selling and investing in real estate, and distributing food services. He thinks that Africa, as well as Zambia, needs to come up with its Afrocentric solutions to be able to overcome the challenges it faces. He intends to contribute to unravelling these intricacies by developing accessible, sustainable and mass-affordable solutions. He will do this by leveraging the local expertise and experience available.
I couldn’t be happier becoming a member of this group with a critical mission. Curtis says that vertically aligning the whole supply chain as well as using technology at each step will allow the positive effects of our efforts to persist for a significant amount of time after we are not here.
Curtis would be in control of Aiponics’ aggressive growth plans: they entail bringing the Harvest marketplace to five more countries in Africa in two years.And opened the first container farm franchise in Lusaka, Zambia.
