Raheja Solar
Founder: Varun Raheja
Portfolio Partner: 2023
Sector: Solar Energy & Food Waste Management
Raheja Solar provides the most affordable and DIY foldable solar dryer for farmers. This enables them to derive greater value from the produce, which otherwise goes to waste or is sold at very low prices. The solar dryer dehydrates the produce without losing its natural colour, taste, fragrance, and nutrients, giving it at least one year of shelf life instead of one week in fresh form. They have installed over 1,850 solar dryers with individual farmers and Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) across 28 Indian states.
Raheja Solar also provides market linkages for dried products in categories of fruits, flowers, and vegetables. Currently, they are sourcing from 40-45 FPOs across different states. They are focusing on strengthening the market linkage vertical (domestic and export) to enable direct impact on farmer livelihoods.
Visit their website to learn more.
About the Founder:
Varun Raheja founded Raheja Solar Food Processing with his mother, Babita Raheja, to address this inequality. After engineering a new, affordable solar dryer and distributing thousands of them across rural India, Raheja Solar Food Processing is now the leading provider of this technology countrywide. The company also trains farmers to use the equipment (designed to dry excess fruit at the highest quality) and then buys back the produce at the highest market price.