The Worlds Food system is unsustainable and unfairly structured. The vulnerable are unjustly marginalized from deriving and living secure lives with respect to food and nutrition. We believe in the re-ordering of the food system through the intervention of advance technology and research in balancing and titling the scales evenly for the world’s eaters.
The Chowberry Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that leverages advanced technologies to address one of the major problems facing the food system today—food waste—and an interconnected social challenge: access to healthy food options for households facing food poverty.
Chowberry utilizes modern technologies such as cloud computing, AI and data science to improve access to quality nutrition and reduce food waste achieving food justice.
Founded in 2014 by Oscar Ekponimo, inspired by his childhood experience with hunger and first-hand view of its link with food waste. To date, Chowberry has facilitated the distribution of over 1.6 Million meals and prevented over 30,000 tons of food from being wasted in Africa. Ekponimo has been recognized for his work with Chowberry as a Time Magazine Next Generation Leader (2017), named Young Pioneer by Harvard Medical School through the World Frontiers Forum, a Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate (2016), a United Nations ITU Young Innovator (2013), featured on the Bill Gates supported Quartz Top 30 African Innovator, and a BBC Top 10 Innovation (2018) amongst other international recognition.
Chowberry started as an app that reduces food waste and improve food access to families facing hunger by allowing grocers trace and monitor products approaching the end of shelf-life and initiate steep pricing discounts on them as their sell-by dates approach. Partner food relief agencies then procure the discounted food items for their feeding programs in poor communities. The organization has grown to impact hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa beginning with Nigeria, and now has official presence in the United States, Zambia, Ghana and Trinidad & Tobago.
The app won the Young Innovators Award 2013 by the United Nations agency for ICT – the International Telecoms union (ITU) and received an initial prize funding for $5,000 which acted as seed funding that jumpstarted Chowberry into what it has become over the years.
As an organization our focus is targeted at three key thematic interventions in Food-Tech, Health and Nutrition, Research and Development for the Food System and Food Waste reduction.
Our expertise in food systems innovation, use of technology for development and Social Entrepreneurship has created numerous opportunities for advisory, collaboration and knowledge sharing for global institutions and top food brands which include Barilla Group, Food Tank, Rolex SA, and British Council.
In response to a UN resolution seeking the use of exponential technologies to catalyze the actualization ofs the Sustainable Development Goals, Chowberry was invited to be part of the inaugural Convergence Project originating out of Harvard University and MIT powered by the World Frontier Forum. The project called “The Chowberries” aims at taking pioneering discovery of low PH sensitive micro-nutrient encapsulation technology from Langer Labs at MIT and an algae based moisture retaining edible packaging technology by Harvard Professor David Edwards and leveraging both pioneering discoveries to create an African Super Food or Nutrition bite to address micro-nutrient deficiency such as Iron Deficient Anemia in developing countries beginning in Africa.