StillFresh: First Spoilage-Monitoring Strip in Asia Pacific

StillFresh is the first spoilage-monitoring strip in Asia Pacific. It allows users to easily determine if food is spoiled through its color-changing technology.

StillFresh enables food businesses to:

1. Reduce costs incurred from spoilage

2. Adopt a more efficient inventory system

3. Promote customer protection

The food service industry loses millions worth of food due to bad inventory management, leading to the wastage of consumable food.

Instead of appropriating still-consumable food to initiatives like food banks and feeding people who need them, these are automatically deposited as waste.

This is because of the absence of an affordable, accurate and easy-to-use way to determine if food is spoiled or of good quality. 

With StillFresh, businesses can grow with less wastage, more profits, and more time in their hands. Eventually, we hope to transform this into a solution to a much bigger cause: hunger.

In 2010, the World Health Organization counted 582 million cases of food poisoning across the globe. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1.3Billion tons of food or up to $680Billion worth of food get wasted very year and one out of nine people in the world suffer from hunger. All these stem from one main problem–unequal food distribution. Our goal is to make food handling easier and in turn, help businesses grow with less wastage, more profits, and more time in their hands so that they may also be able those in need.

StillFresh will be directly distributed to and used by businesses that handle food but it can be advantageous to both food businesses and people who barely reach the sustenance needed to satisfy their day-to-day nutritional requirement. StillFresh can reduce food wasted by food businesses due to bad inventory management and can promote the protection of their customers. Instead of these establishments throwing clean food away, either because of industry standards (i.e. fruits in supermarkets) or because of excess food, these can go straight to the people who need it more. 

Track clients ordering the product - 50 food businesses in the Philippines use our strip

Track clients ordering the product and contributing food - At least 30% of the businesses that use the strip commit to offering excess but clean food as donation

Work with the local government units of each city to procure list of families that need sustenance and have them help in food distribution - Food collected is fairly distributed to people in need in at least 5 cities

StillFresh is the first spoilage-monitoring strip in the Asia Pacific. It is easy-to-use, affordable, and more accurate than conventional methods of determining spoilage. Spoilage-detectors available in the global market are expensive and most them require third-party devices and softwares. These are also prone to damage upon contact with food and complicated to use.

The conceptualization of StillFresh started from the problem of food poisoning and people not being able to accurately determine the spoilage of food. This flaw on consumer protection can be attributed to the inability to manage food inventory properly. From this, the StillFresh idea evolved into a strip that can help businesses lessen food wastage by better monitoring and improve customer protection. In addition, by allowing businesses to determine clean food, excess clean food that were once being disposed right away by different food businesses can now be collected and re-distributed to communities and families that need them the most.

StillFresh is directly distributed to and used by food businesses but the benefits that can be reaped from its use can be experienced by both food businesses and people from different communities. Businesses can benefit from its ability to monitor spoilage, thus improving customer protection and inventory management. On the other hand, excess but clean food from the restaurant that are not yet spoiled can be handed over for the consumption of community members that lack sustenance.

The team joins different competitions and challenges that may lead to the funding of the business. The team also actively participates in Start Up community engagements, events, and conferences that may lead to investment and funding opportunities. Apart from trying to be omnipresent in different important events and competitions, the team also secures features in different media outlets such as radio guestings, television appearances, and articles in order to capture both market interest and investment potential. In terms of obtaining necessary knowledge and skills, the team reaches out to friends and mentors who are willing to provide help or networks of people able to further the business.

StillFresh is currently being used by different food establishments to assess the effectivity of the product. Currently, it is being further developed in order to match the storage behavior of food businesses more. Due to the lack of manpower and knowledge, the progress of the research and development of the product is slow and lacking. Despite this, the team is compensating for this lack through focusing more efforts on R&D as well as seeking help from experts in the field, mentors, and advisers. 

https://www.facebook.com/stillfreshph/

StillFresh started from a desire to provide a more accurate measure to spoilage which can reduce cases of food poisoning. After various discussions and feedback, the idea evolved into a vision to help businesses grow and enable them to combat one of the biggest problems in the world today: hunger. Solve is one of the biggest opportunities for us to share our vision beyond our own country. If we become Solvers, we will be able to inspire people to think more carefully of how they handle their food and work towards the movement of battling food insecurity across the globe.

Our current partners include investors from Original Pitch Venture Capital, a venture firm based in the Philippines, and food businesses like restaurants, caterers, and commissaries all based in the Philippines.

Devices available in the market that has the same feature of detecting spoilage of food.