Impact investing company All On has announced a $1 million investment in Eja-Ice Nigeria Limited, a manufacturer of solar-powered refrigeration and cold chain infrastructure, to support the company’s manufacturing scale-up and extend reliable cold storage to the households, small businesses, and institutions that Nigeria’s unreliable grid has historically left without it. The deal was signed in Lagos, with the funding designed to accelerate Eja-Ice’s expansion across off-grid and weak-grid communities where post-harvest losses remain one of the most significant and persistent drains on small agribusiness incomes.
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The problem the investment is solving
Nigeria loses approximately N3.5 trillion annually to post-harvest food losses — nearly 40 per cent of total food production — largely because cold storage infrastructure does not exist or is unaffordable in the communities where food is produced, processed, and traded. Smallholder farmers are the worst affected, losing up to 35 per cent of their annual income as produce spoils before reaching market. Fishers, traders, and small food processors face the same structural problem: they produce or source goods that cannot be kept without refrigeration, and they operate in environments where the grid either does not reach or cannot be relied upon.
Eja-Ice was built directly in response to this problem. The company provides solar-powered cold storage units, refrigerated transport, and ice production solutions that operate independently of the national grid. Its model — which includes lease-to-own arrangements and Cooling as a Service pricing — is designed to make cold chain infrastructure financially accessible to the micro-enterprises, cooperatives, and community-level operations that need it most but cannot absorb large upfront capital costs.
Nigeria’s post-harvest loss problem is not a mystery. It is a logistics and infrastructure gap that has persisted because the businesses operating in it have never had access to affordable, grid-independent cold storage. Eja-Ice is not a novel idea — it is a necessary one, finally being funded at scale.
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What the $1 million will do
The investment from All On will support Eja-Ice’s manufacturing capacity expansion and operational scale-up as the company enters its next growth phase. Beyond equipment and operational capacity, the funding is expected to enable the company to deploy solutions more broadly across coastal and rural communities where the combination of heat, humidity, and grid unreliability makes cold chain access most critical.
All On CEO Caroline Eboumbou described the investment as consistent with the firm’s approach of backing solutions that improve energy access while simultaneously enhancing livelihoods and reducing costs for underserved communities. The investment also supports the preservation of perishable goods and the strengthening of local value chains — outcomes that benefit both individual households and the small businesses that supply, process, and distribute food products across Nigeria.
Eja-Ice CEO Yusuf Bilesanmi described the funding as a significant step in the company’s vision to build products designed, assembled, and optimised on the African continent. He noted that the investment addresses something larger than electricity access: it is about dignity, productivity, and economic opportunity for the more than 600 million people across sub-Saharan Africa who are still off-grid.
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What it means for agribusiness SMEs
Eja-Ice’s existing partnerships include Chicken Republic and FanMilk — evidence that the technology works at a commercial scale. The All On investment shifts the company’s capacity to serve the smaller end of the market: the fish retailer, the market trader, the smallholder cooperative, the rural processor who has the product but not the infrastructure to bring it to market without loss.
When a small food business can keep its produce cold without depending on diesel or the grid, it gains something that is often overlooked in discussions about SME support: the ability to plan. Predictable cold storage means predictable supply, and predictable supply means contracts, customers, and growth.
