Company Profile:
MANA Nutrition
MANA produces a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) made of a fortified peanut paste that has been carefully formulated to provide a child’s basic nutritional needs. Roughly three servings of MANA a day for six weeks can save the life of a child suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), a condition that affects 20 million children each year. One box contains a full course of treatment and costs just $50. Much of our product ends up in a village setting, treating the world’s most fragile kids by empowering their moms with simple, healthy, ready to eat food. In the past few years, MANA has fed over 500,000 children with RUTF. In 2013, MANA was named Social Venture of the Year by Queen City Forward and was recently given the North Carolina Smart Power Innovator award by the United States Global Leadership Coalition.
Q: Please tell us how your business idea was conceived. Was there an "aha" moment or did it evolve gradually?
A: Many years back we saw on CNN that Saddleback Church in Southern California collectively lost 200,000lbs. As a joke, Mark emailed a staff member saying that it's unethical to lose that weight and should have donated it to help undernourished kids. The staff person immediately replied back asking if they could that. At the time it was most of a joke and we did not have a way to make it this happen. Then in 2013 we had an opportunity to participate in an accelerator program called the Unreasonable Institute where we took the idea for the Calorie Cloud. We knew we needed to partner with the marketplace to make a big impact. The global budget to buy therapeutic food for severely malnourished kids is 150 million and the US weight loss market is 60 billion. If we could connect them, we could make a difference.
Q: What's the most inventive, innovative, or disruptive aspect of your initiative?
A: Connecting overnutrition and undernutrition in way that helps to solve two global health issues at once.
Q: How will it help people live to their greatest potential or contribute to making the world healthier?
A: People's choices to become more active and healthy will have an extra layer of motivation beyond helping themselves; it will directly help a severely malnourished child survive and thrive.
Q: Five years from now, what would you like to be able to say has been your most important contribution to health?
A: Helped to eradicate childhood deaths due to malnutrition while helping millions of American children and adults become more active and healthy.
Q: What single word or phrase best describes the culture of your startup and why?
A: Think big, and then work hard to figure it out.