Nutritious Food Foresight

What innovations are most likely to improve nutrition outcomes in emerging markets over the next five years? The report Nutritious Food Foresight: Twelve ways to invest in good food for emerging markets, published by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Global Knowledge Initiative (GKI) in May 2019, provides twelve promising innovation tools to improve food systems.

According to the authors, these specific innovations can reduce the price of nutritious food, address food safety issues, and increase shelf life, in low and middle-income country settings. In all cases, the primary beneficiaries of the deployment of these innovations would be the poor (or at a minimum, those on modest incomes). All twelve innovations are ready to be deployed at scale within the next five years. 

They are:
- millet-based foods 
- value-added traceability 
- market brokerage via mobile devices 
- cooperative processing and packaging 
- low-cost solar dryer 
- modular factories 
- mobile pre-cooling and packhouses 
- on-demand 3^rd-party logistics 
- near-farm mobile processing 
- small-scale cooling boxes 
- small-scale refrigerated transport 
- solar cooling

The report provides concrete examples of how each concept has already been implemented in a relevant setting, to support entrepreneurs, programme implementers and policy-makers incorporate the innovations into relevant food systems.

Moreover, the report is intended to provide a methodology for screening and prioritising innovations. This methodology is available for others to use, perhaps looking at other important characteristics such as potential for gender transformation or mitigation of the effects of climate change.

(GAIN/ile)

Read more and download the report Nutritious Food Foresight: Twelve ways to invest in good food for emerging markets at: www.gainhealth.org/knowledge-centre/nutritious-food-foresight/