The Sanku Dosifier

12 Aug

MLC VANGUARD | Created by Sanku

Sanku's award-winning dosifier adds precise amounts of essential nutrients into flour during the milling process. It is the first one-size-fits-all specifically designed for the small, rural East African mills that feed that feed the most malnourished people.

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7,100,000 Lives Impacted

Sanku’s solution serves communities who aren’t reached by large-scale fortification, those that are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. We partner with millers whose customers have a high incidence of poverty (~95% of the people we reach live on <$5 per day and struggle to purchase a diverse, nutrient-dense diet) to ensure their access to sufficient micronutrients.

We prioritize mills that serve rural and remote areas, where 66% of the people we reach live. Reaching rural populations is mission-critical as they cannot afford fresh, nutritious foods, and instead rely on calorie-dense, but nutrient-poor maize flour for their meals. This makes them more susceptible to micronutrient deficiencies, leading to high rates of preventable illness and increased mortality from disease.

The Innovation

Worldwide, 8,000 children die every day and 2B suffer from preventable illness because their diet lacks basic vitamins and minerals. Fortification (adding life-saving micronutrients to processed foods) is the most cost-effective nutrition intervention, but it has failed to reach the 6.5B people in developing countries who rely on small, often rural, mills for most of their food. Sanku developed technology and a business model to enable the small mills that feed the most malnourished people to conveniently and affordably fortify staple grain. Sanku equips these millers with the technology and tools to fortify flour with critical micronutrients effectively and affordably. This means that millers can sell fortified flour for the same price as unfortified flour, ensuring that there is no financial burden placed on the consumer, and no need for massive and costly behaviour change campaigns.

Our IoT-enabled Dosifier technology precisely adds nutrients into flour during processing and our business model leverages economies of scale to offset any additional costs for millers and their customers. We have installed close to 500 dosifiers at our 400 partner mills giving thousands of families access to flour that is consistently fortified with iron, zinc, folic acid and vitamin B12, the micronutrients proven to be most critical for women and children during the first 1,000 days. We have a plan to reach 25M in East Africa by 2025, which will prevent millions from death and disease, boost productivity, and save billions of dollars in GDP

About Sanku

Sanku combats hidden hunger and saves lives by giving small mills the tools needed to add vital nutrients to maize flour, an East African staple. Our mission: Guarantee that every meal consumed by every mother & child contains vital nutrients, forever.