By Eamonn Ryan, derived from webinar
The UNEP Cool Coalition recently convened a global dialogue titled ‘Cold Chains for a Hot Planet: Cooling for Resilient Food and Health Systems’, an official side event of the UN Food Systems Summit +4 Stocktaking Moment, held on 30 July 2025. This is part five of a six-part series.
In East Africa, FAO has supported decentralised solar cold hubs and milk chillers to reduce spoilage and improve food safety in the dairy sector. “Cold chains offer not only climate mitigation but a critical boost to rural livelihoods – especially for women and youth” Vaskalis said.
Roberta Boscolo from the BASE Foundation highlighted how digital innovation is helping scale cold chain solutions through ‘Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant’ (Your VCCA), an initiative combining technology, finance and community engagement.
At the heart of this is a free-to-use mobile app called Cultiv@te, which provides inventory tracking, quality monitoring and market intelligence to farmers and cold room operators. It enables transparent use and helps farmers make better decisions on when and where to sell, depending on stored crop quality and real-time market prices.
This approach has already cut post-harvest losses by up to 60% and increased farmer revenues by 40% across pilot sites in India, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau and Iraq. But Boscolo emphasised that cold chains are not just about “cooling boxes” – they need ecosystem thinking: building market access, training and community ownership into their design.
BASE has also developed a digital marketplace to connect farmers directly with buyers, and created a training toolkit to empower cold room operators and users, all under an open-source, incubator-ready model to support global replication.
Energy storage with a purpose: PCMs in action
Vishnu Sasidharan, vice-president at Pluss Advanced Technologies, detailed how phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a highly efficient, thermal energy storage solution critical to off-grid cold chain reliability.
Unlike batteries, PCMs directly store cold energy without conversion loss, making them ideal for intermittently powered systems like solar micro cold rooms. Sasidharan shared the example of a solar-powered 80-tonne cold room in Rourkela, India, set up with UNDP support. Operated by a women-led self-help group, this shared facility has cut operational costs, enabled stable pricing for vendors, and drastically reduced spoilage, all while running entirely off-grid.
As solar adoption rises, thermal energy storage will become even more crucial to managing surplus energy and maintaining 24/7 cooling – key to minimising food loss and improving market timing for farmers.