Keep IT Cool found Lake Victoria fishers needed buyers, not fridges, and built a market

Fisherfolk on Lake Victoria were losing about half their catch each day to poor storage and no cold chain, so the obvious product was a refrigerator. When Keep IT Cool's founders met them they found a different problem: even with cold storage, they could not reliably find buyers.

So instead of selling refrigerators, Keep IT Cool built a market enabled by cooling. It gives solar-powered cold storage to the Beach Management Units at the landing sites, moves fish by refrigerated trucks to its own aggregation centres, and delivers to retailers with a refrigerated fleet. The Markiti app ties all that to real demand from shops, outlets and restaurants.

Cold storage and guaranteed demand together cut spoilage. Launched in 2021, the network serves dozens of supermarkets and thousands of small businesses, moves about eight tons of fish a week in Nairobi, and is building a solar cold-chain facility that will multiply capacity and move into fruit and vegetables.