No more rotten tomatoes: New start-up helps increase tomato shelf life

With tomatoes being the latest vegetable making headlines due to sky-rocketing prices, there couldn’t be a better time for innovations in the sphere of food preservation. A Mumbai-based start-up, Science for Society (S4S), has developed a packaging technology that increases the shelf life of tomatoes by up to a month.

Named ProVegie, the technology taps into the fundamental knowledge behind how tomatoes respire, to create specially designed packaging that allows this respiration, while retaining nutrition, taste and aroma.

Since tomatoes don’t have the shelf life of onions and potatoes, ProVegie becomes especially important in Indian conditions, where continuous cold storage is not a viable option for farmers. Storing tomatoes often leads to wastage, since transportation over large distances causes damage to the vegetable. S4S aims to use ProVegie to create an ecosystem that includes farmers, grocers, retailers and manufacturers.

Watch this video for more on ProVegie and how it helps farmers.