August 2021

The sixth webinar of the #FutureFortified Summit Series was held on 30th June 2021. The virtual webinar was entitled: “Scaling up innovation for a fortified future – part 1 – fortification quality digitization”. The webinar was co-hosted by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the Micronutrient Forum and HarvestPlus, and moderated by Dr. Andreas Bluethner, Director of Nutrition at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

In many countries, foods are fortified with micronutrients to improve the nutritional status and overall health of the population. Such food fortification programs are regulated by standards issued out by the governments. However, many of these fortification programs do not live up to the intended impact. The webinar thus, discussed how digitization could improve fortification quality.

Here are eight highlights our team selected from the webinar:

  1. Digitization of fortification quality data is a potential solution to address governmental constraints and incentivize food industries to fortify.
  2. Achieving scalable food fortification must address many challenges. One solution is to generate and share meaningful fortification data, which provides the ability to trace and verify the journey of food fortification.
  3. Digitization alone is not the answer. For digital to be successful, it needs sponsorship, education, and funding from a combination of public and private organizations working together.
  4. Digital solutions for fortification quality can help nutrition programs to make huge impacts based on real-time data.
  5. Digitization of fortification quality has tremendous benefits for food industries. It helps improve the quality of products, reduces risks, reduces costs, improves overall reputation and authenticity of quality data for monitoring agencies, and improves customer satisfaction.
  6. Connection of fortification quality measuring devices to digital platforms helps to facilitate analytics and data management for both internal and external monitoring systems.
  7. Digitization enables data triangulation, adequacy, and assessment of compliance of fortification data. Sustainable digital platforms can be integrated into government monitoring systems.
  8. A sustainable digital platform to host fortification quality data generated by food industries will improve transparency and confidence among consumers and government regulators. It also encourages food industries to strengthen their food quality management systems.

Our managing director, Dr. Anna Zhenchuk was a speaker at this webinar. She discussed how digital tools can be used to measure fortification quality. She also demonstrated our new QC/QA digital companion to our iCheck devices, called iCheck Connect. Watch a video of our new and exciting digital platform here!

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