The loss of healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables and animal-source foods (e.g., eggs, meat, fish and dairy) from rural supply chains and markets in India remains a major threat to achieving universal food and nutrition security. Critically, unlike staple crops such as rice and wheat, nutrient-dense foods such as fruits and vegetables are highly perishable - particularly vulnerable to damage during transportation and during exposure to warm and/or wet weather conditions. 

Government of India data for 2020-21 estimated that the combined annual harvest and post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables across the country totalled more than 18 million metric tonnes (equivalent to approximately 12.7 kg for every person in India). This magnitude of food loss has significant multidimensional consequences, including for the lost financial revenues of producers and supply chain actors (e.g., wholesale traders and retailers), reductions in the quantity of healthy foods available for consumption, and the environmental implications of the wasted water, fertilisers and pesticides, and carbon emissions associated with agricultural production and downstream supply chain processes (e.g., the transport of food from farm to fork).  Worryingly, warming temperatures and increasingly erratic rainfall events across India are only likely to exacerbate the causes of food loss and waste in future.  

Despite these challenges, potential solutions do exist! In particular, there is growing appreciation for the potential of solar powered post-harvest interventions (e.g., cold stores and dryers) as a means to safely store and preserve the quality of surplus production and reduce the need for farmers and market retailers to panic sell their goods (e.g., by slashing market prices at the end of the day), all while simultaneously connecting rural villages to a reliable source of electricity.  As an example of this growing momentum, the state Government of Odisha recently committed INR 252-crore (£22.5-million in late-2024) “to strengthen cold storage facilities and infrastructure…to minimise the loss and to increase per capita availability of fruits and vegetables”.  However, research from around the world has shown that such infrastructures are all too often developed with little regard for the local context and conditions, including agricultural and supply chain dynamics, traditional food practices, and the needs and desires of the local population (e.g., Ulsrud et al. 2018; Makule et al. 2022; Trotter et al. 2023). As a consequence, even the best-intentioned and technologically sound post-harvest loss facilities can become underutilised and ineffective - owing to the lack of socio-technical fit (Faqeerzada et al. 2018; Zuluaga-Domínguez & Nieto-Veloza, 2025).  

This knowledge gap is exactly where SPIRE-FS comes in! By placing intervention end users at the centre of the design and evaluation processes, we hypothesise that the developed infrastructures should better fit the needs of the rural communities, which should in turn translate into enhanced uptake and utilisation rates, and ultimately broader benefits for the wider food system (e.g., increased storage of perishable foods and reduced loss/wastage rates within local supply chains and markets).  

SPIRE-FS is set to run from March 2026 until early-2029, with the project split into three key stages across the three years: 

1. Formative research (months 1-6):  Prior to starting our formal co-design activities, six months of formative research will be conducted to (a) complete the required ethical approvals and clearances, (b) develop a short-list of study villages/markets/supply chains, (c) conduct initial focus-groups with potential study communities to understand perceived opportunities, costs and challenges of co-developing solar powered post-harvest loss interventions, and (d) refine our data collection tools and procedures for the subsequent co-design stage.     

2. Intervention co-design (months 7-15): The second stage of SPIRE-FS is all about the co-development of the interventions in explicit collaboration with the local community of end-users. Based around the key principles of community-based participatory research and human-centred design, our co-design phase aims to move beyond traditional approaches separating study phenomena from local contexts, encourage greater participation and buy-in from local communities, and respond to calls for the integration of participatory approaches into the real-world development and evaluation of PHL interventions (e.g., Stathers et al. 2025; Bisheko & Rejikumar, 2023). Through a series of participatory approaches, including systems-based group model building, the design process aims to understand the intervention type required/desired, the desired location and food items to be stored/dried, the training needs of the community, the ways in which the facility can be equitably operated and governed, the ways in which the facility can be designed and organised to be as ergonomic as possible (e.g., for rural women). 

3. Process evaluation (months 16-30): As a pilot study, the process evaluation stage aims to monitor the processes underpinning the use, acceptability and efficacy of our interventions, including unexpected contextual barriers and challenges, in order to ultimately provide potential valuable guidance for scaling-up based on how pilots perform across different communities. The process evaluation will leverage a mix of methods in each study site across multiple seasons, including qualitative approaches to understand the experiences and perceptions of users towards the interventions, routine monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to track usage trends and co-design/intervention efficacy, and quantitative surveys to capture the cost-efficiency of the interventions and the ‘indicative’ cost-effectiveness regarding postharvest food losses, the availability, perceived qualities and prices of sentinel NDFs, and select economic and environmental outcomes.  

The team are currently in the process of detailing the above stages in a formal study protocol - which we hope to get published! Please keep your eyes on the 'news' section of our website for further updates.  

A significant body of literature has helped inform our ideas and research plans; a selection of the key works are linked below: 

Literature reviews

• Amjad et al. 2019. Decentralized solar-powered cooling systems for fresh fruit and vegetables to reduce post-harvest losses in developing regions: a review, Clean Energy,  https://doi.org/10.1093/ce/zkad015

• Bazzano et al. 2017. Human-centred design in global health: A scoping review of applications and contexts, PLOS One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186744 

• Bisheko & Rejikumar. 2023. Major barriers to adoption of improved postharvest technologies among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: A systematic literature review, World Development Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wds.2023.100070 

• Davis et al. 2021. Towards food supply chain resilience to environmental shocks, Nature Food, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00196-3

• Meyer. 2020. The role of resilience in food system studies in low- and middle-income countries, Global Food Security, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100356

• Stathers et al. 2025. The evidence on crop postharvest loss reduction interventions for sub-Saharan African and South Asian food systems: a systematic scoping review update 2024, Journal of Stored Products Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jspr.2025.102727

• Trotter et al. 2023. The role of supply chains for the sustainability transformation of global food systems: A large-scale, systematic review of food cold chains, Journal of Industrial Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13445 

Empirical studies and case studies

• Cinderby et al. 2024. Harnessing the sun for agriculture: Pathways to the successful expansion of Agrivoltaic systems in East Africa, Energy Research & Social Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103657

• Kumar et al. 2019. Solar energy for all? Understanding the successes and shortfalls through a critical comparative assessment of Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and South Africa, Energy Research & Social Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.10.005

• Rutta. 2022. Understanding barriers impeding the deployment of solar-powered cold storage technologies for post-harvest tomato losses reduction: Insights from small-scale farmers in Tanzania, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.990528

• Ulsrud et al. 2018. Pathways to electricity for all: What makes village-scale solar power successful?, Energy Research & Social Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.04.027

• Yamauchi & Takeshima. 2022. Solar Power to Transform Food Systems and Rural Livelihoods: Evidence from a Solar-Powered Cold Storage Intervention in Nigeria, Agricultural Development in Asia and Africa [book chapter], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5542-6_24