Nutriset and Plumpy'nut

I was really intrigued by Liyan's presentation last week on ready-to-use therapeutic food for the treatment of severe childhood malnutrition. CNN recently published an interesting article on Nutriset, the company that manufactures only treatments for malnutrition. The article reported that Nutriset made $25 million in 2006, mostly from buyers like Unicef. There is a huge market for treating malnutrition, but I guess this shouldn't be surprising, considering that there were 67 million people in 2002 experiencing severe food shortages and thus requiring international food aid.

The good thing is that they put 80% of the profits back into developing more products, and they are working on African franchises (for-profit) that will produce Plumpy'nut locally.

The Project Peanut Butter website also has a lot of information regarding this topic. The organization was formed by Dr. Mark Manary, the author of Liyan's article. What a small world! Or not..