Peanut Butter Paste Invention

Nov 12th, 2009 2:48 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

Here’s another post for our Food Security in Focus series, this time from MANA about malnutrition and emergency food aid.

Formula 100 (F-100) is pretty cool stuff. It’s a therapeutic milk designed to bring severely malnourished kids back from the brink of death. It works exceptionally well—if you can get it to kids who need it. Delivery is tricky in Africa, where clean water and refrigeration are often not available. A few years ago, a group of doctors and nutritionists developed a way to get F-100 to the kids who need it the most. They mixed it with peanut butter and packaged it in sealed packets. The result was a game changer for the war on malnutrition. They called their peanut butter paste invention “Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF).”

A version of RUTF—Plumpy’nut—is currently being distributed in Africa through Doctors Without Borders. Meanwhile, Mark Manary, the MIT-bred American doctor who started Project Peanut Butter, has been a loud champion of RUTF development. We heard him speak, got inspired (you would be too if you met him) and decided that we needed to take his peanut butter recipe, scale up production and get it to kids as quickly and cheaply as possible. So, we started MANA (Mother Administered Nutritive Aid). Our dream and our purpose is to make RUTF readily available for kids who need it, and to develop other products and practical methods for delivering essential nutrition around the world.

Currently, we’re working on two fronts: production of MANA in the United States for humanitarian emergencies, and in Africa for daily needs distribution.

A child dies from malnutrition every six seconds—about every time you blink. That doesn’t have to be the reality. Malnutrition can be cured and prevented, and we’re starting a movement to that end. Learn more about MANA and tell your friends.

-Mark Moore, co-founder of MANA (Mother Administered Nutritive Aid)

TAGS: Food Security in Focus