Outdoor Insight

24 • Outdoor Insight • August 2018 outdoorinsightmag.com Outdoor Insight: Tell us about BioLite and how you got started. Jonathan Cedar: "We started working on BioLite in 2009. We've had a full team since 2011 and it's been with the goal of re-imagining the way people access energy beyond the grid. About half of the planet still lives in energy poverty without modern fuels for cooking, so they're cooking meals over wood fires. And the smoke from the fires kills more people than HIV/TB/ malaria combined every single year. Paradoxically, the need for modern energy in these markets is growing very rapidly. And cellphone adoption is now over 100 percent in the unelectrified markets of Africa and South Asia. But ironically, these consumers don't have the ability to charge their mobile phones. So they're walking to town and paying someone 10 or 20 cents a couple times a week to charge them. People are consuming energy and spending a lot of money on it, but they really don't have great ways to access it. What we were seeing was with the advancements in technology for solar, thermal electrics, lithium battery storage and LED lights, there really is a huge opportunity to very cost- effectively start to deliver to these off-the-grid consumers clean affordable energy. We started BioLite to try and approach these markets and say, 'What can technology do to change the way we access energy?'" What have been your most impactful products so far? "We started out with cooking. Our first products were wood- burning stoves that generate electricity from waste from the fire with a technology that basically uses solar panels for heat instead of light. And they put out a little bit of extra electricity to charge a mobile phone or run an LED light at night. They start to become the customer's first access point for electricity "Last year, we launched into solar home lighting with a product that's basically a grid in a box. It's a six-watt panel you put on your roof with three hanging lights that go into multiple rooms of your house, a USB port to charge your mobile phone, a radio so you can stay connected to the news. What's really exciting is you can pay for this system using mobile money, essentially a digital wallet, that many African consumers have on their phones rather than a credit card. So we have the ability to help, not just deliver technology but also create new financing tools that allow folks like small holder farmers, to pay for these products in very tiny installments over time." Explain BioLite's unique business model. "BioLite is a for-profit company. We call ourselves a social enterprise. We are a company dedicated to delivering social, environmental and economic benefit to its end users through the commercial market mechanisms, which we believe can scale that impact most quickly. This is very different than Tom's 1-for-1 model or Patagonia 1% For the Planet, which we think are great models but fundamentally are limited by the scale of the outdoor market that those companies play in. "What we do is we use the revenue from our outdoor markets to support the growth investments in emerging markets. It's not someone buys a stove and we donate a stove into a rural household, but rather, someone buys a stove and we invest in the team and the infrastructure that can organically scale these products in the emerging markets." Why is it so important for you, BioLite, to give back in these emerging countries? "Our company is split into two locations — half works out of Brooklyn, New York, where all of our technology development, core operations, finance and outdoor customer sales/marketing and customer service is located. The other half of the company is based in Nairobi, Kenya, where we BioLite's Innovative Enterprise Talking Shop with Jonathan Cedar, CEO and Co-founder of BioLite Q&A Jonathan Cedar, BioLite co-founder

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