Food Processing - January 2020 Update

We are happy to be sharing updates about what we have been doing from the beginning of the 2019 spring semester until now!

Our main updates revolve around the grater. We made significant progress on a more sustainable grater design necessary for QueenTech to grow and support operations on earned revenue from sales. Since the spring of 2019, the technical team made the decision to re-evaluate different architectures for the grater and settled on a simpler design that cantilevers the head directly on the motor shaft. By switching, the team was able to reduce the number of components, price, and maintenance required.

The newest version of the grater.

We were also able to work with a supplier in China to provide a motor that meets our design specifications necessary to move forward with production. On our most recent trip, we delivered a small batch of these motors to QueenTech for testing and sales. This upcoming semester, we plan to order a larger batch to significantly increase grater production! These outcomes were made possible by a generous grant from The Dow Chemical Company received last fall.

We brought on a new employee to QueenTech, Nana Yaa, who has been working with us for many years and accepted her offer at the end of the most recent trip. Her experience and expertise will be extremely valuable to QueenTech as it begins to grow. We are incredibly excited to have her officially on the team! On the most recent trip, she was able to put her thesis experience to work prototyping new heads for processing banku, another Ghanaian staple food, which could create new possibilites for women processors in addition to gari.

Ben with Nana Yaa accepting her offer.

2019 was an incredible year for QueenTech, and as we begin the new decade, the future of small scale food processing is bright! We'll keep you posted as best we can.

The 2019 Team: Debbie, Nana Yaa, Boakye, Francis, Ben, Claire, Colvin, Maggie, Lucas, John, Diego, Herve, Hanna, Rebecca, Lujain, Radia, and Nathan

The end of a successful trip!