The role of Frugal Innovation in ensuring global food security

This chapter investigates how frugal innovations (FIs), targeted at achieving “affordable excellence”, can help ensure better food security, greater social inclusion, and ecologically sustainable economic development. Rising costs for food can push many vulnerable individuals and households into poverty, undernourishment, or starvation with potentially severe humanitarian, economic, and social implications. Food processing can be defined as a process of value addition by methods such as grading, sorting, and packaging of raw agricultural and horticultural produce with the purpose of making it fit for human consumption, enhancing shelf-life and improving nutritional quality. FIs refer to products and services that significantly reduce the total cost of ownership by focusing on core functionalities and reducing non-core features, leading to greater resource efficiency and optimised performance. Scholars have brought FIs in connection with food security as a means to “ameliorate intractable social problems that plague developing societies and lead to inclusive growth”.