Meet Paul Shale, co-founder and CEO, and Dr Abishek Sriramulu, co-founder and CTO of ruru, one of the 22 ventures participating in the Sprout Accelerator Spring26 Cohort.
We caught up with Paul and Abishek for a quick-fire five questions in five minutes to learn more about ruru and what they hope to achieve from their time in the Sprout Accelerator.
1. Tell us about ruru. What are you building?
We are building a system that helps supermarkets know how much life fresh goods have, and therefore where they’re best to go.
2. What problem are you working to solve?
A lot of fresh food gets thrown out - even when nobody did anything wrong.
Picture two pallets of the same fruit arriving on a Tuesday. One was cut in the cool of the morning and was in a chiller ninety minutes later. The other got cut late, and sat waiting for a truck. At the Distribution Centre, they look identical and cost the same. Come Friday, one gets marked down to clear whilst the other sells at full price.
Globally, about 30% of the food harvested for people is never eaten. By the time a supermarket writes fresh food off, everyone upstream has already been paid. Growers wear the other end with 1.2 billion tonnes that never even leaves the farm.
3. How does your solution work?
First we forecast how many days of life a delivery has left. Then we work out the best thing to do about it given all the constraints that exist. Nothing about the supermarket operation changes except allocation - which pallet goes where, changing how things last wherever they end up.
4. What is the next important milestone for your venture?
Working with a supermarket and their growers to configure the process and validate the gains.
5. What are you hoping to get out of your time with Sprout?
People who will challenge us, and people who’ll work with us.
We have the scientists, the forecasting and optimisation models. Now we’re after validation.
Narrowing our skills to a single category, validated with a single customer, is what our Sprout mentor pushed us to do - and it is the most useful thing that has happened to us so far.
Find out more: https://ruru.bio/