The Hindu Business Line : Fortifying Britannia’s brands

We are working a lot with NGOs. We also created the Britannia Nutrition Foundation to accelerate our understanding of various aspects of nutrition. We were recognised at the Clinton Global Initiative, which is quite an honour, because it selects three commitments. This year there were 1,400 commitments and Britannia was one of three selected for the plenary where we shared our experience creating these public-private partnerships.

The work that we have done with the Naandi foundation has been written up as a case by the Harvard case-writers and is part of the World Bank Institute Training curriculum.

The insight is that biscuits are a great carrier of nutrition. But, how we came upon it — was a no-brainer! We were making biscuits for the UN as part of the World Food Programme. And these are biscuits they take and drop as part of their food baskets, wherever there’s war and floods. So we thought if we’re making it for the rest of the world, why not in India.

We worked on a recipe which is highly fortified, which means that four biscuits, for a kid who is 12 years old, give about 70 per cent of the child’s daily requirement of iron, which is the biggest deficiency in India. About 65 per cent of school going children in India are deficient and it’s agnostic to socio-economic groups. So, wherever we can supplement the diet of these children — not substituting — we are doing that.

We are working with a foundation in Delhi and found that after 90 days of consuming these biscuits, the levels of haemoglobin were found to have gone up to 10.5 on an average from 7 earlier, which is quite significant. What we did was take that insight of fortification and we are fortifying almost 50 per cent of our biscuits. The levels of fortification for biscuits we sell in the market are different, though, and meet the WHO norms of fortification.

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