BioLite Achieves Company Milestone, Reaching 1M Lives With Clean Energy

December 17, 2020

The social enterprise delivers on their promise of bringing energy solutions to off-grid households.

Brooklyn, NY (December 17, 2020)— BioLite, an innovator and leader of off-grid energy solutions, is proud to announce that through the company’s tenacious efforts to reach rural off-grid communities, BioLite’s clean energy solutions have impacted over a million people in emerging markets.

The milestone, achieved in Q4 2020, is the result of years of user-centered product development, building key last-mile distribution partnerships, and utilizing a unique business model that leverages a concentrated R&D team while stabilizing the path to growth. As of September 2020, BioLite has reached over 1.4M off-grid individuals across Africa and Asia with their clean cookstove and Solar Home solutions. This reach has more than doubled over the past year alone, indicating a new phase of scale for the social enterprise.

 “We started this company 10 years ago with the belief that everyone deserves access to energy,” says BioLite co-founder and CEO Jonathan Cedar, “this milestone is proof that our concept works: that you can pair renewable technologies and an economically sustainable business model to transform the way families living off-grid access essential energy.”

With impact sitting at the center of BioLite’s business, it’s not just how many people they are reaching, but whothey are reaching that matters: in a 2020 report put out by 60 Decibels, an independent social impact measurement firm, BioLite product was listed #1 for impact, reaching the highest percentage of customers accessing energy for the first time and rated as the #1 top performer among customers on quality-of-life improvement since acquiring a new household energy solution (multiple brands and organizations were included in the survey).

In honor of reaching the benchmark of 1M lives impacted, BioLite has been officially welcomed into the 2020 cohort of Million Lives Club (MLC), an international group made up of innovators and social entrepreneurs that seek to celebrate scalable impact amongst communities living below the poverty line. BioLite has been recognized as an MLC Vanguard, honoring their work specifically related to their impact and innovation with the BioLite SolarHome Series.

The designers and engineers who work on BioLite’s emerging market solutions are the same team that work on BioLite’s award-winning outdoor products, thanks to their unique business model known as Parallel Innovation. United by a common need for off-grid energy, these two audiences work in tandem to provide a stable revenue stream and scalable impact, giving BioLite the runway and momentum to fulfill their vision of energy access for all.

“We share this accomplishment with our outdoor community: every purchase over the last ten years has helped us fund our work creating lasting solutions for off-grid families around the world,” says Cedar, “We look forward to sharing more stories of impact in 2021 and connecting our outdoor customers even more to BioLite’s mission.”

To learn more about BioLite’s parallel innovation business model and company mission, please visit: https://www.bioliteenergy.com/pages/mission

About BioLite

BioLite is a social enterprise that develops, manufactures, and markets advanced energy products for off-grid communities around the world. The self-reliant energy company creates novel cooking, charging, and lighting solutions that serve both outdoor enthusiasts and rural communities without access to modern grid energy. The company has been the recipient of numerous recognitions including Popular Science’s Best of What’s New, Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards, BusinessWeek’s Most Promising Social Enterprise, and a nomination for Outdoor Retailer’s Inspiration Awards. Headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., the company was founded in 2009 by Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond. Discover more about BioLite at BioLiteEnergy.com