Food fortification

Supporting governments to scale up food fortification programs.

Our country-level support for food fortification focuses on advocacy for improved policies and legislation, providing technical assistance to governments and industry partners, conducting public health and economic analyses, and leveraging markets and social safety net programs as the main delivery platforms to improve populations’ access to critical micronutrients.

We advocated with several governments and industry on the importance of policies that promote or secure food fortification. This work contributed to several countries, including Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, either passing legislation mandating fortification or adopting revised standards to ensure all producers were meeting the required quality levels.

In Pakistan, we launched a second phase of the Food Fortification Programme, continuing to work closely with the government and industry to ensure critical micronutrients are available to the general population through the fortification of both wheat flour and oil. A new value addition to the project is the digitization of oil fortification quality assurance data and quality control systems.

At the global level, we continue to be an active player in furthering the food fortification agenda. In the run up to the UN Food Systems Summit, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) and the Nutrition for Growth Summit, we worked with partners to launch a new commitment guide on staple food fortification, which urges relevant stakeholders to take smart pledges to use fortification to improve nutrition and strengthen food systems. At the food systems summit, along with other key food fortification partners, we pitched for a game-changing solution to modernize the micronutrient value chain through food fortification.

Looking ahead

Supporting the continued scale-up of food fortification.

Nutrition International will continue to support global evidence generation and dissemination, advance the in-country scaling up of food fortification interventions, and strategically engage with partners to address existing evidence gaps. We have partnered with Emory University and the Food Fortification Initiative to develop a global Food Fortification Blueprint and generate evidence on the impact of food fortification on anaemia. In collaboration with the World Health Organization, we are exploring the potential of using digital technologies for food fortification.