Food fortification is considered to be the most effective way of addressing poor nutrition. It’s cheap and needs little consumer knowledge or drastic changes in attitudes.
In a recent Guardian Q&A, GAIN’s director of large-scale food fortification, Greg S. Garrett, argued that private sector leadership needs to be encouraged. “After all, they produce the food we eat,” he said.
Ahead of the Future Fortified event in September, it’s a good time to ask: what might the future face of the private sector look like?
EatLimmo is a young start-up based in Monterrey, Mexico that has developed a fortified ingredient made from waste fruit peels and seeds using a patented technology.
The ingredient is aimed at replacing some eggs and oils in staple foods, such as baked goods, whilst addressing micronutrient-deficiency and obesity by lowering the level of trans fats and increasing nutritional intake, according to co-founder Enrique Gonzalez, GAIN has a strong portfolio of fortification projects itself.
It has been working in the Punjab province of Pakistan since 2013, and this year 200 independent millers in the region committed to voluntarily fortifying their wheat flour.
Most notably, in 2008, GAIN partnered with the World Food Programme and introduced fortified flour packed with iron and folic acid into baladi bread, a cheap food option that forms the backbone of daily diets in Egypt. The aim was to improve child development and reduce anaemia by 28%.
Gonzalez sees comparisons with the work GAIN has done to improve baladi bread and what EatLimmo is doing. In rural Mexico food options can be limited, he says, and though the best solution would be to remove fatty and unhealthy stuff from daily intakes, it’s not that easy. Price is one major barrier.
In her report published by the Copenhagen Consensus, Rebecca Spohrer, senior associate on GAIN’s large-scale fortification programme, explains that “in an ideal world everyone would have access to diverse diets, with a mix of fruit, vegetables and whole grains,” but that such a diet is “prohibitively expensive”.
A start-up like EatLimmo could potentially help bridge this gap by making what Gonzalez calls the most nutritious parts of produce, sourced as waste from local businesses and restaurants, available as a low-cost ingredient. For instance, banana peels contain a high level of vitamin B6 and B12, while apple peels are said to be rich in iron and folic acid, and mangoes are loaded with vitamin A.
While there may be clear evidence of nutritional benefit, there still remain challenges of scaling up. How will enough peels and seeds be sourced? Will any nutritional goodness be lost during the process that turns the raw material into its powder form if production levels are increased?
Gonzalez suggests any challenges can be addressed with the support of the development sector. “I think it would be of great value if a global NGO can be a vehicle in getting our food science and solution to big producers. Given the same mission and core business, it would benefit both parties,” he says – the NGO would have access to knowledge, technology and ingredients previously not considered.
The immediate advantage of working with such a start-up, to an NGO, would be that it’d be partnering with people who have lived the very experiences its work is addressing. “When I was a child I was obese, and when I was 15 years old I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes,” says Gonzalez.
It was this that inspired him to think about bringing “a movement of food science into everybody’s kitchen” and “how you can use what is local and available to you, to give households better food at a better price”.
For Gonzalez, preparation of food in the home can be central to eating well. “You can’t beat [the] mothers,” he adds, referring to their cooking. He sees potential for his ingredient to be turned into a product – similar to multi-nutrient powders (MNPs) – that households bake into breads or add to soups. GAIN has previously had success delivering MNPs to families in Nigeria and Afghanistan.
Promoting good eating practices from an early age, including through home fortification, is critical to reducing stunting and improving child development. At the 1,000 Days symposium held earlier this year, director Marti van Liere spoke about how “the private sector can be incentivised to bring [nutritionally good] products to the market”.
Gonzalez believes that at the heart of incentivising producers to invest in fortification is finding ways to change “the composition of food, without [altering] its flavour, colour or texture”. Products that mimic the real thing in these three key areas are more likely to succeed economically. They’re likely to be more marketable and satisfy consumers.
Based on research and talks with interested parties, Gonzalez says his start-up can reduce production costs by 5-10%. Back at the symposium, Van Liere noted that a continued full market approach, “from sourcing of raw ingredients to distribution channels – the demand creation”, is needed. A start-up such as EatLimmo might fit the bill.
To read more on hidden hunger and food fortification, please visit the GAIN, Devex platform, an online series addressing this global health challenge.
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