The Thought for Food Challenge brings college students from around the world together to solve one of the biggest challenges facing our future: how to feed more than nine billion people by 2050, and a team from Iowa State is in on the action.

Last year, Iowa State’s Gung-ho Globies, a team formed by five ISU students, designed a personal food dehydrator they called KinoSol for the challenge.

This August, four Iowa State students formed a team for the competition dubbing themselves the Groundbreaking Globies. Members of the Groundbreaking Globies include juniors Emily Zagula, Heidi Kalb and Katie Cummings and sophomore Paige Myers, all global resource systems majors.

Together, the four have come up with an idea of a portable refrigerator with renewable energy sources. such as solar energy, inspired by the cooling system of human body. The team hopes that the refrigerator can improve peoples’ lives in underdeveloped areas like sub-Saharan Africa, since the harsh conditions there result in “hunger seasons” every year.

“After harvest, in sub-Saharan Africa, everybody is selling their crops right away, so market price is really low, and everybody must sell their stuff because they have no place to store their grain or meat,” Myers said. “After that they don’t get a lot of money back, and in a few months they have absolutely nothing to eat [n]or the ability to buy.”

She added that the refrigerator the Groundbreaking Globies designed is aimed at fixing the storage problem. 

“Our goal is to be able to help them to store food for longer, so that in the hunger seasons they have the ability to sustain themselves.” Myers said.

Although there have been a lot of solar refrigerators on the market, a multitude of issues prevent them from being able to be used in Africa.

“Either they are not mobile, they are too expensive or they are not big enough. So we are trying to create something with all of the things combined to make a better product and [make it be] something that is actually feasible for smallholder farmers in Africa to use,” Myers said.

Other than the team’s shared major, the four are from different backgrounds. Zagula’s second major is environmental studies, Kalb’s is nutrition, agriculture and society for Myers and animal science for Cummings.

“We fit very well for each other.” Kalb said, adding that the different  backgrounds can always “bring something new” for the team. 

Currently, the team meets three times a week to work on their first prototype. It is a brand new experience for the team to create something new and beneficial to the world.

The team has already done a lot of research and solicited the help of professors and students in different areas to gain more knowledge for the product.

“We started from the very bottom,” Kalb said.