Greenway Grameen
Greenway, founded in 2010 and based in India, designs, manufactures, and sells improved cookstoves to replace open fires and rudimentary mud stoves used by rural households. The company's two principal business areas are clean kitchens and renewable and efficient power. Its core products are the Greenway Smart Stove and the Greenway Jumbo Stove, both constructed from stainless steel and aluminium, carrying a two-year warranty, and typically lasting six to nine years in the field. Stoves retail to end customers at approximately 3,000 rupees (around 30–35 US dollars). Since 2014 the company has operated its own manufacturing facility in Gujarat, and maintains warehouses across five states at eight locations. To date it has sold roughly three million stoves and holds anonymised data on approximately 1.5 million customers.
The primary target market is rural middle-income households in India, with additional operations in several English-speaking African countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Because customers often lack access to unsecured credit, Greenway works extensively with non-banking financial companies that provide micro-loans repayable in small instalments. The company also structures forward sales of voluntary carbon credits — registered with voluntary carbon registries and generated by the emissions reductions its stoves achieve — to secure prepayments from carbon offsetters and intermediaries, which are used to subsidise stove prices for end customers, sometimes reducing the retail price from 3,000 rupees to as low as 500–1,000 rupees. Direct field sales teams carry out village-level demonstrations and door-to-door sales in areas where a dealer-distributor network has not been established.
Greenway has recently expanded into renewable and efficient power by installing rooftop solar systems on urban cooperative housing societies under a Renewable Energy Service Company model, in which the company owns the assets, sells units of electricity generated under ten-year power purchase agreements, and transfers ownership to the society once costs are recovered. Efficient lighting products are also sold in both urban and rural markets. The company generates approximately 90 percent of revenue from cookstoves, kitchen appliances, and carbon credit sales, with the remaining share coming from the newer power business. It reached profitability in 2013 and reported revenues of approximately 11 million US dollars in the 2023–24 financial year.
Greenway has received grant funding from the Clean Cooking Alliance, equity investment from Acumen and Asha Impact, and early-stage support from angel investors including the entrepreneurship centre at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. The company employs functional teams covering sales and marketing, finance, supply chain and manufacturing, and information technology, and holds anonymised customer records to support operations and product development. Leadership has consistently highlighted gender inequality as a structural barrier to adoption, observing that sales performance is stronger in regions of India where women have greater economic agency.
Ankit Mathor