Mazzican – Milk Transportation System
Intellectual Ventures Lab
Solution Overview & Benefits
Mazzican (MTS) is a durable 10 litre food-grade plastic container that has a wide opening which makes it easy to pour milk into it.
The wide opening also has made cleaning the container easy while the white transparant plastic enables farmers to detect dirt easily.
A black coloured milk sieve that is distributed with the Mazzican has multiple purposes: it is a tool to detect Mastitis and prevents unwanted materials from entering into the milk.
Farmers milk directly into the container, whose detachable black funnel helps to identify signs of a cow’s udder infections, limit contaminants and prevent spillage if the container is tipped over. This better enables farmers to milk using both hands, which increases the yield from the cow. The attached lid is then secured onto the container, which itself is stackable for easy transport from the farm to collection centers that purchase milk. Once emptied, the food-grade plastic container can be easily cleaned thanks to an extra-wide opening and a fully-accessible interior.
History & Development
Global Good and the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory originally approached the problem from the perspective of farm-level pasteurization, but soon realized what these smallholder farmers really needed was a much better, low-tech method for collecting and transporting milk in a hygienic and safe way. Moreover, we knew from our extensive work in Africa with dairy farmers that they wanted a simple, low-cost solution to help maximize the quantity and quality of milk they were able to sell, and we needed to design a product that could be manufactured locally, not imported from overseas.
Derived from “maziwa,” the Kiswahili word for milk, the result was Mazzi, a durable food-grade plastic container designed with a wide mouth that better enables farmers to milk using both hands.
- Global Good projects have transitioned to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures.
- Ashut Engineers licensed to manufacture and distribute Mazzican in Kenya and eastern Africa
Availability
- Publicly available: yes
- Countries where available: Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda
- Available online: yes
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