Food Fortification Scales Only When Hardware Meets Enforcement

Felix Brooks-Church argues that food fortification works best when it improves foods people already rely on rather than asking families to change their diets. Salt, edible oil and flour already move through daily meals: oil may contain vitamin A, flour zinc and iron, and salt iodine. He describes the underlying science as simple, safe and roughly a century old.

But the intervention is not simply a matter of adding nutrient powder to food. In the countries where Sanku operates, Brooks-Church’s model depends on four linked systems: dosing hardware that fits local mills; remote operational monitoring; a dependable supply of nutrient premix; and public rules and enforcement that extend fortification beyond one company’s own network.

The need begins with what he calls hidden hunger. A family may have enough maize flour to fill its stomach, but if starch dominates the diet, it can still lack essential nutrients. Brooks-Church says hidden hunger affects three billion people and that children face its most severe consequences, including stunting, delayed brain development, deformities and preventable illness.

The relevant distribution point, in his account, is the village mill: between the farm where grain is grown and the household where flour is eaten. These mills are individually small—about the size of a bedroom, he says—but collectively feed entire nations. That makes them a potentially powerful delivery system, provided the technology can work under their actual conditions and the system around it can keep operating.

Sanku, the social enterprise Brooks-Church co-founded with David Dodson, was built around a basic proposition: a machine installed on a local mill could fortify a village’s flour at the point of production.

The technical challenge was not merely to create a working prototype. It was to create one that could fit the variety of mills already in use. Brooks-Church began building devices in Kathmandu in 2010. His first did not work; after a year he had one that “kind of worked.” When he brought it to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, he found that the mills there were completely different, and the machine failed again.

He spent another year developing devices in a metal shop and working with millers across East Africa. The resulting design was shaped through that co-design process. Installations shown in Nepal, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya illustrate the standard he set for the device: it had to work with existing local milling equipment across different settings.

By 2015, Sanku had commercialized the Sanku dosifier. A miller loads raw grain into one side and a condensed nutrient premix into another. As grain exits the device toward the mill, its loss of weight is detected and triggers a feed screw that releases a precise amount of premix. The grain and nutrients are mixed in the mill; fortified flour comes out the other side.

The machine’s simplicity is central to the claim, but so is its position in the supply chain. It does not depend on households measuring supplements correctly or changing meals. It makes fortification part of the normal production of flour they already buy.

A dosifier at one mill does not by itself create a scalable system. Sanku faced tens of thousands of dispersed mills, Brooks-Church says, and could not support them by sending staff and vehicles around East Africa to locate malfunctioning equipment.

Its response was to install SIM cards in each dosifier. Production data can move through local cell towers to Sanku’s systems, allowing the organization to see where mills are located, how much they are producing, how much nutrient premix they are adding, whether dosing appears accurate and whether a device may need repair. A dashboard shown in the talk maps mills across East Africa alongside production metrics, while a mobile interface presents a circular performance gauge.

That monitoring system turns the mill device into a managed network. It is intended to make servicing and quality control possible without a large field operation trying to identify problems blindly.

Sanku reached one million people in Tanzania by 2020, Brooks-Church says. Around that point, MacKenzie Scott gave the organization an unrestricted $8 million grant. Brooks-Church says the organization chose not to use the money mainly for near-term overhead or burn rate. Instead, it put the funds toward infrastructure: an all-African executive team, further technology and systems development, more than 1,000 dosifiers, and what he calls East Africa’s first nutrient premix factory.

The premix factory addresses another dependency in the model. A device can dose accurately only if the nutrient powder is available at a viable cost. Brooks-Church says the factory was built to reduce those costs at scale. Sanku expanded from Tanzania into Kenya and, in the previous year, Ethiopia.

Brooks-Church’s larger claim is that Sanku cannot solve hidden hunger as a standalone operator. “We’re not just trying to build a company,” he says; “we’re trying to build an industry.” That shifts the model from installing and monitoring machines to building the public capacity that can make fortification a market-wide requirement.

Sanku works with governments in the countries where it operates to pass stronger fortification mandates. It also helps upgrade laboratories with equipment and protocols to test flour in the market, and trains food inspectors and provides them with tools to regulate the industry. The company’s connected dosifiers can monitor participating mills; mandates, labs and inspectors are meant to establish whether fortification is happening more broadly and whether standards can be enforced.

That public layer is the model’s limiting condition. Hardware can add premix, data can identify weak performance, and a factory can make nutrients available. But the system becomes durable at national scale, in Brooks-Church’s account, only when governments mandate fortification and can test and enforce it.

Sanku was about 24 months from its original goal of reaching 100 million people when Brooks-Church announced its next target: “10-10-1”—10 years, 10 countries and one billion people.

He calls the number audacious, but grounds it in what he sees as a changing policy environment: governments mandating fortification across Africa and Asia, alongside a machine and operating model that Sanku says have worked in its current markets.

Brooks-Church offers his son Leo’s experience as a personal illustration of hidden hunger, not as another component of Sanku’s operating model. Leo is autistic and, Brooks-Church says, had an extreme eating disorder. For years, he would eat only perfectly round, perfectly brown pancakes.

Brooks-Church says Leo was wasting away, nonverbal and aloof. His wife Lia added vitamins and minerals missing from his diet to the pancake mix without changing its look, taste or color. He says Leo became stronger, more alert and began speaking. He also emphasizes that Leo’s progress involved speech therapy, food therapy, special tutoring and a broader support team.

Leo has since started school and graduated kindergarten. For Brooks-Church, the experience makes the general premise tangible: nutritional deficiency does not necessarily present as an empty plate. When a staple food dominates a diet, an invisible nutritional addition to that food can matter substantially.