I have a confession to make: I take for granted that I can store my lunch in the office fridge. Furthermore, I don’t give much thought to the fact that my building has access to electricity and, as a consequence, my home fridge keeps my groceries fresh. Even worst, I never image how my everyday life would be different if I didn't have access to a fridge.
But for Hamid, who lives in a small village in Morocco, a fully-functioning fridge would mean the world. At least, he would not have to take the daily 6-hour long trip to the local souk (as the marketplace is called in North Africa) to buy fresh products.
One of the other students said: 'Well, it’s a container that evaporates, so it’s an evaptainer,' Taylor explained.
A potential solution to Hamid’s problem comes from Boston-based startup Evaptainers, almost 3,500 miles away from Africa. At Evaptainers, engineers are developing a portable fridge that doesn’t need electricity.
The story of the company, which is now headquartered at MassChallenge as an “alumni in residence,” starts at a class of the MIT Development Lab. The first day, the professor asked for ideas that “would change the life of one billion people.”
Quang Truong, at that time a master’s student at Tufts University who had a chance to cross-register into the class, wanted to be up to the task. Thanks to his background in agribusiness, he was aware of an electricity-free technique to produce cold by leveraging the evaporation of molecules. All he needed at that time was a group of engineers to perfect an efficient device based on this principle. And there’s no shortage of engineers at MIT.
Fast-forwarding, Truong got accepted in the 2014 MassChallenge class and started working with Spencer Taylor, a local entrepreneur who Truong met thanks to Taylor’s wife. Currently, Taylor is the CEO and Truong the COO of the company.
Evaptainers, which has a provisional patent on the current version of the fridge, call the portable fridge “EV-8.”
Here’s how it works - a user fills up the sides of the fridge with water and then its walls begin to draw out the water’s heat through evaporative cooling, resulting in an internal storage space that can reach 15-20 degrees Celsius.
“One of the other students said, Well, it’s a container that evaporates, so it’s an evaptainer,” Taylor said while explaining the name of the company, which may result hard to pronounce. “Some people hate it, some people thinks it makes perfect sense.”
The pilot market is Morocco, a politically stable country where the company has an office with two full-time employees. In Morocco, there’s little penetration of electricity and a dry climate that allows the device to work its best, Taylor explained. Almost 30 Moroccan families currently use the evaptainer, with more beneficiaries to be added during the summer.
“But we also see a lot of potential in the U. S. market,” Taylor said, mentioning a launch of the refrigerator in the outdoor gear market in 2018. For the U.S. market, the portable fridge will cost under $200, while the target price for developing countries is between $25 and $35.
As for funding, Taylor said that the company has been entirely funded by grants so far, for a total of almost $400,000. A seed round to scale into commercial production will launch in the next six months.
Photos provided.
