WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Building a photo voltaic food dehydrator has served up national acclaim.
Five yrs after starting his organization, Dr. Klein Ileleji has been regarded by the U.S. Small Organization Administration as one of the leading little organization exporters in the country
JUA Technologies Global – a business that aims at making drying food simple, risk-free and sustainable –was lately named both the Indiana and Terrific Lakes Location Exporter of the Year.
In 2016, Dr. Klein and Dr. Reiko Ileleji, cofounded JUA Technologies Intercontinental, which produces the Dehytray, a solar food items dehydrator.
The notion behind the solution deliberately arrived from analysis that Dr. Klein Ileleji carried out with the Division of Agricultural and Organic Engineering at Purdue College, trying to deal with meals insecurity in establishing nations around the world.
Through his study, he discovered that was a substantial need to have to establish an very affordable method to dry fruits that had been harvested in advance of they spoiled.
Klein Ileleji took his results back again to Purdue and established Dehytray, and began to provide his merchandise to farmers in Asia and Africa.
“I developed a dehydrator that encompasses all sorts of food,” Klein Ileleji explained. “It’s compact enough for the key crop, but it is more significant for the develop, and that is how it started off. At the time the engineering was produced, the question is how do you choose it to the people? And which is when I started out the company.”
Packages made available at Purdue University, this kind of as the Purdue Foundry system, give startups a system to experiment and acquire next-market blueprints.
“Luckily I designed the know-how at a time when Purdue was really scaling up the entrepreneurial ecosystem on campus,” Klein Ileleji reported. “The Foundry, the entrepreneurship academy, just lots of issues to guidance faculty, to develop corporations and to acquire them to their next stage.”
“I realized it was heading to be extremely hard if I still left this plan to buyers, for the reason that it is in Africa, and a whole lot of folks will say that the market place is not there. So staying an immigrant from Nigeria, and understanding the difficulties as a kid, I made a decision to consider it upon myself, with my husband or wife, my wife, co-founder, Dr. (Reiko) Ileleji, we commenced the organization together.”
Despite the fact that Purdue aided the Ilelejis build their organization, the pair ran into quite a few difficulties once they experimented with to provide their solution internationally, specifically trying to covert global currencies, as effectively as developing a robust foothold in various international locations.
The pair reached out to the U.S. Little Business Administration for support, and SBA provided them programs on how to provide their products in global markets.
Ileleji received the awards at a press conference at the Purdue Convergence Heart, on May possibly 5, in which Andrew Reinke, SBA’s Indiana District Export Council chair, shared a several terms concerning the Ileleji small business.
“The merchandise itself and the enterprise is exceptional since it was not 1st recognized heading immediately after the domestic market. And there was a purpose for that. Generally, you have to do that to turn out to be a participant in the export accelerator (method). But in this circumstance, Klein and Reiko understood properly that the ideal marketplace for their product or service was the creating international locations, not the designed nations around the world. Where food stuff insecurity is a authentic problem and the availability of electrical energy is scarce,” Reinke claimed.
Even though Klein and Reiko were being really humbled to receive the awards and recognition from SBA, they talked about that they are continue to rather early in increasing their firm.
“We’ve only marketed a fall in the bucket. The marketplace is huge, we are talking of billions of farmers and we’ve only bought hundreds. So, first of all, the industry for this technological innovation is massive and we would like this engineering to be accessible to any farmer that desires to have it, which are tens of millions of them.”
“We also have quite a few technologies in the pipeline by now staying formulated as aspect of this. In reality, we have four other technologies, solar-run dehydrator in a selection of styles and kinds, which do a may differ of items, in progress by the company.”
“This know-how is not just for producing countries, but it’s also for the U.S… We have the nearby U.S. industry to produce and we’d like at-residence gardener to give it a consider in the U.S.”
Noe Padilla is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. Electronic mail him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at 1NoePadilla.