Three enterprises based in India are among the winners of ‘Best Small Businesses’ global competition as announced by the United Nations. These businesses are providing diverse, inspiring and impactful solutions in improving access to sustainable and healthy food.
Highlights
- 50 medium and small sized enterprises globally have been announced as the winners of the Best Small Businesses of the Good Food for All competition.
- This competition was organized in concomitance with the UN Food Systems Summit.
- The winners from India are Oorja Development Solutions India, Edible Routes Private Limited and Taru Naturals.
- The winners have been selected from around 2,000 applications from 135 countries across the world.
- All of the 50 winners showcase diverse, impactful and inspiring solutions in improving access to sustainable and healthy food.
- $1,00,000 in cash prizes will be shared by the winners.
- Youths constitute of half of the winners and nearly half of the winners are women.
- The winners are from 42 countries.
Edible Routes
This enterprise was founded by Kapil Mandawewala. Edible Routes provides its consumers with easy access to fresh farm produce which are locally and naturally grown. The business model of this enterprise is to allot farms to city dwellers, and has the capacity of catering to 220 families. The enterprise’s workshops and educational courses also teach people to become the stewards of their community supported agriculture and grow their own food.
Oorja Development Solutions India
It is a farming-as-a-service (FaaS) company which operates as a junction between renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. It installs, finances and maintains solar energy systems for use in agricultural. This enterprise also sells reliable and affordable irrigation, cooling and milling services to the farmers so they can transition to solar from diesel energy. Oorja was founded by Dr Clementine Chambon and Amit Saraogi.
TARU Naturals and Organics
This enterprise was founded by Ruchi Jain. It is a grassroots movement of 10,000 small-scale and tribal farmers from across the country. This company wants to create a fair trade network that connects farmers to various markets, with pure, organic and healthy produce. The enterprise is striving to intervene with agriculture that is climate resilient, build self-sufficient market chains for farm produce, market linkages, clean post harvest technology, and value added products. The company also envisions to double small-scale farmer incomes and safeguarding the sustainable rural livelihoods.