Miraal Kabir and Martin Turuta

Six Questions for Miraal Kabir and Martin Turuta, Co-Founders of Safi of Canada/Rwanda

Ms. Kabir is a native of Pakistan who grew up in Oman while Mr. Turuta is a native of Moldova who grew up in Denmark.  Both did their “uni” (undergraduate studies) in Waterloo, Ontario – getting business degrees at Wilfrid Laurier University and STEM degrees at the University of Waterloo. They both got involved in a one-time only ideation program mounted during the pandemic to keep students involved, called Challenge4ClimateAction.

That competition focused on problems happening because of climate change. In the initial problem definition quest they found a reference to an earlier coronavirus – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), that upon infection is 10 times deadlier than Covid and a key transmission vector is camel’s milk. This especially resonated for Ms. Kabir as she had been in elementary school in Oman during the first MERS outbreak, and this had naturally spread to the adjacent area of Eastern/Horn-of Africa where mammalian milk is a core component of nutrition.

Wrestling with this problem set eventually led to some ideas which were highly rated in the Climate Challenge, which encouraged them to further develop them into what has eventually become Safi. They entered Safi into a number of startup competitions when their UN connections referred them to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Food Forum Startup Innovation Awards competition produced by Extreme Tech Challenge where they won the Digital Innovation in Food Processing category in 2024.

1. What problem is Safi solving and how?

Overall, our aim is to bring transparency and safety to the dairy supply chain in East Africa – and eventually elsewhere in the Global South. The problem is that only 20% of the dairy market is regulated as westerners are accustomed, 80% just farm-to-table with very little visibility to regulators and what that’s causing is diseases and poor milk quality to bleed through to the customers and ultimately causing illnesses. In turn, we saw the core ‘problem’ was mainly a lack of tool set as well as a lack of training and education on what pasteurization is and what’s required to reach that standard. And on top of that, 80% is a huge volume of milk – many millions of liters daily within the whole East African region.

2. What is your background that led you-two to founding Safi?

Miraal: I’d like to say “I grew up on a farm and love cows” but honestly that’s not true. Neither of us has a background in bioengineering or similar, but I’ve always been really passionate about giving back, helping those less fortunate. Once we stumbled upon the problem of unsafe milk, it was almost like I couldn’t unsee it. And especially knowing that we could have a potential solution to it.

Martin: As they say “we did not choose this life, it chose us” We were kinda shocked that with so many huge dairy corporations out there processing and marketing milk, nobody has picked up on this problem. Also, when we took our first very crude prototype out to Rwanda, we thought we’d be laughed at, but in fact we got great “user feedback”, almost everyone felt that this was something that could really change their lives. That was the first time where I felt “this is something I think I want to do for a very long time”.

3. What is unique about Safi’s technology and what is its
validation status?

Basically, it is miniaturizing pasteurization so that individual smallholder farmers can treat small batches safely and effectively, to essentially democratize pasteurization across East Africa. Currently pasteurization is realized as a large-scale industrial process with big vats and plumbing and pumps, so it is usually done further down the supply chain at intermediate wholesalers and producers. That’s what worked in the first cycle of 20th Century industrialization, but it is largely impractical for the conditions on the ground in the Global South.

So, we designed a handheld unit for small batches – it includes timer, thermometer, and a whisk to stir the milk to assure even treatment, and a lid to go on their own pots – also importantly a user-interface that guides the farmer through the process end-to-end and literally shows them when pasteurization is complete.

As we said, we got great validating feedback. When you’re building a product for very rural areas like this, the only way to iterate is to GO THERE, get in the field, meet “the customers”, get live feedback and design to that. We’ve been to Africa four or five times now and, every time, we both received additional validation and learned something new that we returned to further refine the product.

XTC: You did, after all, win the award for “Digital Innovation” in food processing, tell us about that?

A critical additional feature is turning the tool into an IoT (internet of things) device so that all the details of the pasteurization event (time, place, quantity, achieved temperatures and duration) can be transmitted to government regulators, so they can certify that this is safe, pasteurized milk, allowing the farmer to sell it at a premium and the consumer to buy with confidence. On our trips, we learned that a key problem is lack of transparency and consistency – health officials don’t know where milk is being sold and at what quality, and when we asked different folks about measurements we got different answers from each. Then we realized, as so often these days, that among our most valuable outputs was data itself and being able to provide a single shared and accepted source of truth for the whole ecosystem.

So, it’s a two-pronged solution, both the execution of the pasteurization and the real-time audit trail to health and safety authorities, both of which could not have been even 20 years ago because we now have the miniaturization of compute and sensors, widespread digital wireless and cloud computing and communications that allows us to empower smallholder dairy farmers at the “edge”.

4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?

In our product discovery and development process, we were working with a number of NGOs who have already built networks of thousands of farmers that they assist. So, to streamline getting our device into service in the field, we are initially selling the device to the NGOs, who then provide the device to the farmers as a microloan on a pay-as-you-pasteurize model where they are charged a fee for every hour the device is in use, which eventually covers our sell-price and we get a piece of that recurring revenue. We think that will be a sustainable commercial business model.

Now, downstream, in an industrial supply-chain you have the raw producer, a co-op that does the processing, then a packaging center that puts it in cartons which then go to a retail distributor. The end-consumer is paying maybe 3x to 4x what the raw milk producer gets. If now, the farmer can get a nice premium for certified pasteurization and then direct-sell that to local users, the users are still getting safe milk at a substantial discount, but leaving enough margin to increase the farmer’s return and pay the fees for our device. The classic tool of dis-intermediation, cutting out middlemen.

5.  What is next?

We have been doing 3 to 4 pilots and are now moving to the commercial phase. By the end of 2026 we are planning to roll out about 1,000 devices and actually by the end of this summer we (Miraal and Martin) will be moving our households full-time to Rwanda to oversee GTM production there and in Kenya, build our supply chain and deepen our partnerships with the farmers and NGOs and really push the device out there.

Longer term, of course this smallholder-industrial disconnect is not unusual to East Africa. Looking just across the sea from there is, well, INDIA, which is a huge, huge market of over 70 million dairy farmers. Not all of the Global South is heavily into mammalian milk, but many other large markets are, so I think there is alot of upside for Safi downstream.

6. Tell us about your experience with XTC

It has been such a great opportunity to network and, of course, get in front of the judges and investors from around the world who are all individuals we are really inspired by. The network of XTC and of FAO is so impressive. We were told, on future applications always mention that you won THIS competition, it really takes you far and will help keep you connected. The application itself was a great experience – simple and straightforward and doing the 2 minute video is a really good exercise to distill and showcase your passion. And now you have invited us to present live at the Science, Technology and Innovation Forum at UN Headquarters in New York in May (2025) and also doing this audio interview, it’s all tremendous exposure and validation for a startup on the cusp of scale-up.