Using Food Technology to Improve Global Nutrition

On this episode of Assurance in Action, Intertek experts Sandra Meixner, Britta Bellersen, and Gerhard Rimkus talk to David Morgan from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to discuss Intertek and GAIN’s partnership to find sustainable ways to strengthen the systems to improve nutrition around the world.  

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Transcript

[00:00:11.350] - Jessica D’Amico

Hello and welcome. You are listening to Assurance in Action, the podcast of your total quality assurance provider, Intertek. Today I am joined by Intertek’s Sandra Meixner, the global program manager for ATIC Food Authenticity Services, Breda Bellersen, Team Leader of Supply Chain Management and Food Services, and Gerhardt Rimkus, Senior Food Consultant. And we're talking to David Morgan, Senior Technical Specialist for Quality and Safety at GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Does everyone want to go around and introduce themselves?

[00:00:48.650] - David Morgan 

Thank you. Yes. I'm David Morgan and I'm a food technologist working with GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. And I've been working here since 2014 and my background is in the food industry. Sandra.

[00:01:06.830] - Sandra Meixner

Thank you, David. My name is Sandra Meixner. I'm a state certified food chemist and I was the first contact point for the GAIN Premix Facility at Intertek in 2010.

[00:01:20.070] - Britta Bellersen

My name is Britta. I'm a food technologist too. I worked for Intertek since 2017 and I became the program manager for the Game Premix Facility in 2017 as well.

[00:01:39.750] - Gerhard Rimkus

Hi, I'm Gehadramkos. I am chemist and working for entertainment Services as a senior consultant and project manager since eight years.

[00:01:54.430] - Jessica D’Amico

Great. Thank you. So, David, what is GAIN?

[00:02:00.610] - David Morgan 

Okay. Yeah. So GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. We're a not-for-profit foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland and established in 2002. And our purpose is to tackle malnutrition, which we do by transforming food systems in low- and middle-income countries. And we do that by working with governments, international agencies, NGOs and private sector. And that includes Intertek, who we partner with. We employ around 150 people located in over 15 countries. And we have established country offices in Asia. So that's in Bangladesh, in India, Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Tanzania. And then we also have representative officers in Geneva, Switzerland, in the UK, in the USA, and in Netherlands. And the way we operate is with donor funding. And that comes from philanthropic organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, and a number of other philanthropic organizations. We have governmental foreign aid from the USA, from Netherlands, from the UK, Canada, Denmark, and a number of other countries. And then we have UN agency funding, including UNICEF and World Food Program, and funding from charitable organizations including GiveWell foundation. GAIN is focused on alleviating malnutrition and just to be clear, that's not working directly with communities suffering from acute malnutrition in emergency situations in response to conflict or drought or flooding or other disasters, because there are situations which are for specialist organizations such as UN agencies, Medicine, Frontier, Red Cross, Red Crescent.

[00:04:09.760] - David Morgan 

So GAIN focuses more on the underlying changes to strengthen food systems. And our goal is to improve the consumption of nutritious and safe foods for all people, specifically targeting a billion people with major improvements to food systems, working across the food value chain. And just to capture our work streams or some of our work streams. We have large scale food fortification, which we'll come back to, and that's about improving the consumption of adequately fortified staple foods, staple foods typically being flour and maize meal, oil, salt, rice and some others, appropriate diets for women and children, which is finding sustainable ways to improve diets and nutritional content. We have a workstream on workplace nutrition working with employers and employees to strengthen knowledge of nutritious foods and accessing them the marketplace for nutritious foods, and that's looking at food supply systems for small and medium sized enterprises, post harvest losses, healthy food choices for adolescents. We have a workstream on innovative finance, and the way we work there is to connect finance institutions with food businesses, also in urban nutrition, focusing on rapidly urbanized environments and adapting the food value chains there. And then we also work a lot with knowledge dissemination.

[00:05:51.190] - David Morgan 

And we're currently co-hosting the second Global Summit on Food Fortification series of events with co-hosts the Micronutrients Forum, Harvest Plus, and also GAIN is organizing side events at the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit through December, just for those who are not sure what large scale food fortification is. So this is focused on activities to make staple foods more nutritious, and that's largely not entirely, but largely industrial food fortification. And this takes place mostly under mandatory legislation where there are laws in place to say that if these staple foods are produced, then micronutrients are added. And this is typically do replace missing micronutrients, which are missing from the diet or missing and or missing from the food where they're processed and no longer there. So the food vehicles for those micronutrients are chosen appropriately. So for flour and maze meal, that's wheat flour and maize meal, zinc and iron are typically added, also some B vitamins, folic acid, B twelve, and others sometimes fat soluble vitamins as well, and in oil, fat soluble vitamins added, always vitamin A, sometimes also D, and occasionally vitamin E as well. Salt is a good vehicle for iodine, so salt iodization is the most successful of all the large-scale food fortification programs globally, vitamin A and sugar, and then others, including milk, rice, condiments, which includes soy and fish sauce.

[00:07:49.270] - David Morgan 

And so I'm part of the large scale food fortification team, and more specifically, I'm also very closely involved with the GAIN premix facility.

[00:08:00.910] - Jessica D’Amico

So the premix facility involves Intertek. So how did that begin and what is everybody working on there?

[00:08:08.880] - David Morgan 

In response to increasing demand for fortified food production food producers, it was recognized that they needed affordable premix of reliable quality, premix being the micronutrients which are added to the fortified food vehicle. And in most lower income countries, these fortifications are not produced, and they're imported and they may not be available and they may be very expensive and the quality may be questionable or unknown. So in 2009, GAIN created what we now call the GAIN Premix Facility, or the GPS. And essentially that created a quality assured list of suppliers. And that's now grown to 55 sites at the latest count across 18 countries. And that includes a number of categories. So we have premix blends, vitamin A micronutrient powders, which are sachets for home fortification, potassium iodate, which is the source of iodine for salt fortification. And essentially, we publish that list and we put that in the public space. And there are two benefits from that. Firstly, any food producer can access that list of quality assured suppliers and they can buy directly from them, and then GAIN approval is also recognized by UN agencies. So World Food Program requires that all of their fortified food products use premix from a GAIN-approved source.

[00:09:55.450] - David Morgan 

And the second important point is that we run a procurement platform and we work with that quality assured list of suppliers. So if a food producer or a government agency needs a supply of micronutrients for national fortification or industrial fortification of foods, then they can approach the Game premix facility. We can float a tender to request the supplies they need. We float that with all of our approved suppliers, and the best offer is presented to the client and then we supply. Now, the way the transaction works is that GAIN would buy the premix from the premix producer, and we supply to the client. And that then allows us to offer credit terms, because that's further help to food producers. And we do that through what we call the revolving fund, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we can take from that fund, use that to pay for the credit we pay for the premix. And then if the food producer has been granted special credit terms, then we can use that fund to pay for that. Now, I mentioned that we were established in 2009, and it was just after that in 2010 when we started the collaboration and partnership with Intertek.

[00:11:28.040] - Jessica D’Amico

Can we speak a little more about Intertek’s role and what their main tasks are?

[00:11:33.500] - David Morgan 

Sure, yes. So we need to assess and audit and reorder it currently 55 producer sites in 18 countries, and we can't do that with our own team. And that's the way that we work in GAIN. We partner with organizations so that we can expand and leave the resources that we have available to us. So we look to work with a specialist organization. And we reviewed in 2010 a number of specialist service providers. And we selected Intertek food services based on their ability to conduct food safety audits and also their knowledge and capability in testing fortifications and fortified foods. And that testing is conducted in Bremen in Northern Germany. So that partnership has changed over the period, and it now focuses primarily on fortified foods testing, including the micronutrients and the foods themselves, as well as supplier audits and the management of those supply audits. So every consignment of micronutrients which GAIN supplies to industry that will be tested by Intertek. And Intertek currently also testing a large quantity of fortified foods from a number of countries to assess the status of those fortification in market samples. So that includes salt and flour and oil and sugar.

[00:13:05.930] - David Morgan 

Audit services and food testing services are the primary areas where we collaborate. Yeah.

[00:13:12.720] - Sandra Meixner

I think that shows the learning curve that we've gone through together, David. I think I remember the first days in 2010 when we started with the testing and the vitamin testing is not so easy. It's not just a routine thing, especially from all the different companies. But I think over the years we've developed this program really good, and I'm really glad to test now also the end products that go to the consumers to be sure that they really reach them.

[00:13:43.180] - Gerhard Rimkus

Yeah.

[00:13:43.470] - David Morgan 

Micronutrient testing really is a specialized area, partly because of the matrix that's there the low level of these micronutrients and a number of other factors. And I don't know if you have a comment on that, Gerhard.

[00:14:01.530] - Gerhard Rimkus

Thank you, David. Yes. Micronutrients, the vitamin testing is very complex and also for the metals, mainly for iron and zinc. Since seven years performing for GAIN lab assessments in many African and Asian countries, to evaluate in the labs their ability to test micronutrients in the fortified food of the country and to see the status quo and to see their accreditation, whether they are accredited or not, and then to give recommendations to GAIN for improving the situation in these labs, that they can also do the testing of the national food fortified food, to build the capacity of the labs and to give them also some trainings or to support them with equipment. And this is, I think, also more and more now lasting years, a focus of GAIN that also the national labs will be capable for this testing. But as said, up to now, most of these market samples, these fortified foods are tested by Intertek and Bremen.

[00:15:34.540] - David Morgan 

Yes. It's certainly a part of what we do and focus on in GAIN to strengthen national laboratories, particularly national regulatory laboratories, because that's part of the regulatory and enforcement monitoring and enforcement process in a country. And our ultimate aim is to become redundant, of course, but we're some way off that, and we simply can't stand still. So we have to innovate. And it will require continued input on building capacity of laboratories, particularly regulatory laboratories, and supporting industry to access quality assured micronutrients and improve the level of control over fortification. And I think expanding the Game premix facility to include new categories of premix, which we've done in the last two years. Two examples of this is fortified rice kernel. So in the scheme of things, a relatively new type of premix, and that's necessary for the way that rice is being fortified. And then also there's a specific one for India, which is a type of encapsulated iron, encapsulated ferroflumerate, which is used in double fortified salt, which is salt, which is both iodized and enriched with iron. And all of those requires specialized and reliable testing as well.

[00:17:23.910] - Sandra Meixner

What I really like about this is it shows that it requires all the different efforts. So it's not only about testing, but it's also the processing itself, the technology that you have to have, the knowledge all around it, the support inspections that need to be done, and of course, the quality controls locally to improve that to a level that the countries can do that by themselves.

[00:17:48.650] - Britta Bellersen

And the situation is maybe nearly different in each country. So it could be different in China and in India if you want to order, for example, the fortification level in the different countries could be different and the technologies as well?

[00:18:09.470] - David Morgan 

Yes, very much. We supply a number of premix blends in the GAIN premix facility. And for each one of those, we need to develop a product specification, a standard. On a national level, that specification would be standardized, but then on an international level, it can be very different. And maybe the only common thing for something like fortified flower, although there are exceptions to this, is that iron would be present and then the finished product standard would be different right across almost from every country.

[00:18:55.720] - Britta Bellersen

Maybe we can talk about the programs which are established in the country, like Nigeria, that you make some market assessments there as well to improve the situation there, to get more knowledge about the markets and so on.

[00:19:21.730] - David Morgan 

Yes. So one of the things that GAIN does and has done is conduct market assessments to establish the status of food fortification across the country or across a region. And that looks at the effectiveness because taking samples from industry is only one way of assessing the situation and taking market samples and home samples. That's another way. And so it's the whole picture which then adds up to the status of understanding the level of food fortification. So, yeah, that is an important thing that we are working on. There was an interesting development in the last year, which was a method development. I wonder if Gerhard could say something about this, and this is the method that Intertek developed, and you worked with GAIN and our support to publish that method.

[00:20:29.810] - Gerhard Rimkus

Thank you, David. Yes. The vitamin A analysis, especially in edible oil, is very complex, and edible oil in many countries is fortified by vitamin A which is most of the countries are also mandatory. Most of the labs, usually they are using a method which is very complex, time consuming, a lot of solvents and so on. And this method is not very reliable. And so Intertek Bremen, the laboratory developed a simple method, an HPLC method for the analysis, which is very reliable. We could show it also in comparison exercises. This method is now accredited also in the Bremen laboratory. And so GAIN supported now that this method is published in an international journal so it is open access to everybody and so everybody can take over this method. And in the second step we also did an exercise with selected laboratories in four countries in Bangladesh, in India, Ethiopia and Nigeria to support them to develop this method also in their own laboratories and to validate the method and the final goal would be then that this method is also in these national laboratories accredited. So that was an exercise over the last months.

[00:22:17.570] - Gerhard Rimkus

The problem was that of course due to the situation pandemic situation that we could not support directly on the spot so it was only by email and by video calls and so on but several laboratories were very successful and they were very happy that they could do they were supported by me with this development of this method and this will be a great help I think for these labs who joined the project it certainly will.

[00:22:52.830] - David Morgan 

It will be very useful for laboratories and oil producers. In some cases they have been using what we call the traditional method which uses saponification and to use this new method if this can be adopted then that can produce more reliable results. It's simpler, it's quicker and so there are a lot of benefits to be had from laboratories using this published method which is specifically related to retinol parmitate in fortified oil yes and GAIN supported these labs also with some chemicals and so on which were needed for the method.

[00:23:44.130] - Gerhard Rimkus

So this was also a benefit for these labs.

[00:23:48.870] - Jessica D’Amico

Thank you all for joining me today and thank you for listening to assurance in action. If you would like to learn more please check out the links in the description of this podcast. Also please give our subscription a rate and a follow and don't forget to like us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks again and have a great day.