Demand growing for food for malnourished children

Demand for Edesia Inc. products – ready-to-use therapeutic food and ready-to use supplemental food for malnourished children – keeps surging, says founder and CEO Navyn Salem.
In the last three years, the nonprofit company’s manufacturing facility on Royal Little Drive in Providence has nearly doubled its workforce to 48 employees and added new machinery to keep up with the demand for its high-energy peanut pastes known as Plumpy’Nut, Plumpy’Sup, Plumpy’Doz and Nutributter.
“You’re never too excited when demand increases to keep up with the growing crises around the world,” said Salem, explaining that the company’s ready-to-use food products are targeted to assist disadvantaged communities and refugees in emergencies and conflict zones.
At her home, while watching the news about the continuing crisis in Syria and the refugee problem, Salem said she recently saw an image of a child refugee eating one of her products. Edesia products are helping to feed some 2.5 million Syrians, according to U.S. government officials.
Since production began in 2010, Edesia has provided food products to more than 1.5 million children in 35 countries, including Chad, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Pakistan and Syria. The ready-to-use food products are distributed overseas through partnerships with agencies, including U.S. AID, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, UNICEF and the World Food Programme.
Last year, the Edesia facility produced and shipped more than 6,000 metric tons of food products, according to Salem.
Edesia’s increasing presence on the global stage has recently garnered recognition for the positive role the company plays. On Aug. 29, Salem hosted a tour of her facility by U.S. AID Administrator Rajiv Shah, who oversees the $50 billion-a-year agency, accompanied by Rhode Island’s congressional delegation and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras. The details of running the company involve more than just making ready-to-use, nutritious food products with a long shelf life: there are the complex logistics of shipping products overseas, the painstaking negotiations with agencies to develop specific products and the mechanics of improving efficiencies on the production, according to Salem.
“West Africa is very much in our sweet spot from a geographic perspective,” Salem said, explaining that transportation costs are fairly reasonable and the region had been beset by strife and drought. Mali, Chad, Benin and the Central Africa Republic are some of the countries that Edesia has been shipping to on a regular basis for UNICEF.
Edesia is currently making new variations of their products for the U.S. government, Salem continued. “We’ve just completed the first procurement of a RUSF – a ready-to-use supplementary food,” she said. “The government has also requested a generic version of our RUTF, a ready-to-use, therapeutic food product. We have a lot of new products in trials, looking at schoolchildren as a new vulnerable population that could benefit from expertise in these types of products. Also, looking at RUTFs for pregnant and malnourished mothers.”
All the food products now created at Edesia are targeted for an export market, but Salem said that she was looking for the right opportunity to do something in the domestic market.
The key will be finding the right partner agency, because it takes an incredible amount of work in the field to set up protocols, she says.
Many of the initial employees hired when Edesia first began production in March of 2010 had been recently resettled refugees, working in partnership with the International Institute of Rhode Island. For Salem, there was a personal connection to this business strategy – her father came to the United States from Tanzania, learning English as his fourth language.
“No one can understand the importance of our product better than they can,” she said of those employees, explaining how one had lived in a refugee camp for 17 years.
Many of those original hires are still with the company, Salem continued. “Some of the best hires we’ve made have been part of the team since day one.”
Staying true to the company’s mission as a social venture is an important component of the way Salem has managed the business. “We measure ourselves in the numbers of children we can treat,” she said. “We have improved efficiencies in our manufacturing, lowering prices every year, even with commodity prices fluctuating and often increasing.”
Salem spoke proudly of Edesia’s ability to control the product prices. “We’ve never seen a price increase since we’ve opened, even though a huge percent of the product is raw ingredients.” Salem acknowledges that at some point there will be a limit.
Still, she continued, “It’s really important that there is no waste. We are very careful with every penny. That way we can come up with the highest-quality, lowest-cost product for these kids.”
In September 2010, Edesia was featured in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine, which was helpful to the startup in getting its name out there and to establish credibility with donors. Today, Salem said, the company’s no longer dependent on donations.
“We are a true social venture that’s sustainable for the future,” she said. •

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