IDB Lab Invests in a Technology Startup to Incentivize a World With Zero Waste

IDB Lab, the innovation laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank, has invested $1 million in Sugo Company, a climate technology startup from Peru that offers innovative solutions to generate tangible value in waste. This support will allow the company to expand to all cities throughout Peru and at a regional level in Colombia, Mexico, and Chile and promote the circulate economy. 

Annually, millions of tons of food and consumer products that are still usable are wasted in the world. In Latin America about 10% of total retail production is at risk of being discarded, and the impact of global food waste alone represents 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions which accelerate the rate of global warming.

To incentivize a world without waste, Sugo Company, born in 2019, has developed two products that materialize and encourage the zero waste agenda:

1. Sugo Store, an online store that exclusively sells batches that are soon to expire, have surplus inventory, have aesthetic flaws, or have slow rotation with discounts ranging from 30% to 90%, and that quantifies what it means to rescue said products in savings in CO2 emissions. In less than 24 months of operations in Peru and Colombia, more than 120 strategic partners such as L’Oréal, Nestlé, Bayer, and Unilever have joined, and more than three million products have been rescued. 
    
2. CoreZero, a management, quantification, and authentication services platform that allows the companies that are behind these waste reduction efforts to obtain an equivalence of their impact in CO2 units, which are then converted into carbon credits to generate financial incentives and accelerate the impact of their actions, to be launched in 2022.

IDB Lab’s investment adds to a seed round of USD $5.5 million, in which other leading investors in the region, such as NAZCA and FEMSA Ventures, participate. It allows Sugo Store to expand its reach in the regional market and launch the first version of CoreZero to be integrated into similar initiatives of strategic partners in the region and the United States, creating the first carbon credits as a result of the reduction of discarded items.

This project is expected to rescue more than 65 million products from having to be discarded, which would generate an economic savings of USD $137 million for consumers, as well as sequestering 8 million tons of CO2 emissions per year in the fight against climate change.