Safi brings profits back to local farmers while ensuring consumer safety

East Africa faces a severe milk ety crisis, with the highest global incidence of milk-borne diseases leading to significant child mortality. About 30 per cent of these deaths children under five, primarily due to raw milk purchased from unregulated markets that lack ety tools for pasteurization. 

University of Waterloo alumni Miraal Kabir (BCS ’24) , Daria Margarit ( BMath ’24) and Martin Turuta ( BMath ’24) , aim to improve milk ety with i , an innovative off-the-grid portable pasteurization device that can ensure its ely pasteurized, provid a solution for East African farmers. 

"To create equitable and resilient economies, we really need to understand local dynamics and cultures, and then create systems and businesses accordingly," Kabir says.

"For i , we did a deep dive into the local East African dairy supply chain, and we learned that farmers, despite supplying 90 per cent of the milk, earn the least amount of income anyone else in the dairy supply chain due to low prices paid by aggregators and processors." 

To address this, i includes a new app offering farmers a digital dashboard to prove their milk is pasteurized, enabling them to command higher prices for er, value-added milk. The i team hopes the data collected will also help the government regulat e the market and improve access to pasteurized milk. 

We asked Kabir to share her experience as a student and entrepreneur at Waterloo, as well as the inspiration behind Safi and the world ’ s first off-the-grid portable pasteurization device.

Coming into university, Kabir was uncertain about her academic path or future plans. Her primary goal was to immerse herself in a stimulating environment.

" Waterloo is known for their entrepreneurship, its incubators and its research. I thought there was no better place for me to figure out my next few years than at the University," Kabir says.

However, the global pandemic shifted students to online learning shortly after she joined Waterloo. While Kabir, Margarit and Turuta met in first year in the same double degree program, offered jointly by Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University, they discovered their strong teamwork skills after competing in an Ikea case competition.

In 2021, an advertisement for the Challenge4ClimateAction, hosted by Convergence.tech , sparked their interest in working together again. The competition’s focus on climate-related issues, including the impact on milk safety - a concern in Kabir’s home country of Oman - resonated with them. After 10 days of developing a solution, presenting judges and winning $6,000 in funding, their startup, Safi, was born.

" I don ’ t think we really had the intention of turning Safi into a company, it was just an idea for a pitch competition," Kabir says. " But our passion for solving the problem drove us to keep working on Safi for the next few years, and here we are."

To advance their idea, the Safi team actively pursued pitch competitions for funding. They received support from Waterloo ’ s Velocity incubator , United College ’ s GreenHouse , the Queen ’ s’Entrepreneurship Competition , ASME ’ s’iShow , Enactus National Exposition, and the Enactus World Cup in the Netherlands.

" Many students have ideas that could change the world but often doubt their potential," Kabir says. " I think it ’ s’important for institutions to support students and their ideas, regardless of whether they don ’ t become a startup."

In fall 2023, Safi was accepted into Validate Global, an Australian business accelerator, which offered connections with local NGOs for field testing in Rwanda. With additional funds from the Faculty of Mathematics and the Math Entrepreneurship Fund, the team completed their first pilot with government officials, NGO officers, and local farmers and vendors in Rwanda.

In February 2024, Safi secured $15,000 from Waterloo Ventures - administered by Waterloo Commercialization Office ( WatCo ) and Velocity ’ s’Up Start program - which provided crucial funding and business advisory to help scale and commercialize their product.

" Velocity and Greenhouse do a lot to support the economy, where we see many big tech startups and some unicorns around the country that have originated from Waterloo and its incubators," Kabir says. " By supporting these early-stage startups, these incubators can really help accelerate change in our local and global communities."

Safi ’ s first month-long pilot in Rwanda produced 7,500 litres of pasteurized milk and reached 1,700 families with nutritious and safe drinking milk. However, every pilot While talking to local farmers, the team discovered a significant education gap they had not anticipated - most farmers did not know what pasteurization was. 

While visiting Rwanda and other nearby East African countries, the team set a goal to reach at least 300 farmers and families to get educated about pasteurization. Safi hopes to continue its mission of running workshops during each visit, where hundreds of farmers can become familiar with the pasteurization process and how Safi’s device can help them pasteurize milk more efficiently.

" We definitely didn’t get it right on the first try," Kabir says, noting that the Safi team took valuable feedback to make informed product changes. " You really have to talk to your target users; they might tell you something different because research can only get you so far."

Another surprising finding for the team was that many East Africans had access to electricity but avoided using it due to costs. Initially, Safi ’ s pasteurization device was manual, but farmers ’ feedback highlighted the impracticality of manual cranks. 

Their fifth iteration of the device features a built-in motor that requires rechargeable batteries powered by solar panels, making their pasteurization device 66 per cent more energy-efficient than traditional methods and cost-effective. The team anticipates the next device upgrade will include a protective cover to keep out leaves and insects, which they had not anticipated when testing their products in Waterloo.

" The 30 to 40 devices we initially piloted were made in the Engineering 7 machine shop and in the Velocity Science lab," Kabir explains. " Making 3,000 devices is no longer feasible. need find a manufacturer produce these devices a cost before expanding other regions Africa , South America India , where unsafe milk also a significant issue." 

During their trip, the Safi co-founders also learned about a crucial education gap that they had not accounted for in their initial research. Now, every time the team visits a new village in Africa, they run workshops with hundreds of farmers on the importance of pasteurization.