Progressive Wednesday

The little “Plumpy’nut” that could.

I subscribe to more magazines than my eyes, noggin, and free time can handle, but subscribe to them I do. Often, this leads to a lot of skimming, looking for articles about topics I’m hungry to learn more about, looking for articles that might be pertinent to Progressive Wednesday.

A recent piece in the January/February 2007 issue of Business 2.0 couldn’t be ignored. According to an article by Carleen Hawn, close to a billion people in the world live hungry. And then I read this:

Malnutrition kills more people annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, [and] the United Nations says a child dies from the complications of malnutrition every five seconds.

The average person reads 250-350 words per minute, which means that by the time you read the end of this post, approximately 30 children will have died from a lack of food.

All hope ain’t lost, though. There are many fantastic organizations out there battling this exact problem: World Food Programme, Unicef, America’s Second Harvest, Meds & Food For Kids, and Oxfam, amongst several others (all of which would graciously accept your donations).

But, once again, there’s a way to make money and make the lives of those suffering better. Nutriset, a French business that describes itself as a “company fully dedicated to humanitarian and social programs,” has developed a new product called “Plumpy’nut” (I gotta say, I would have come up with a less, I don’t know, goofy name). They doled out 500,000 of these über-nutritious bars last year. Each bar contains 500 calories, ground peanuts, whey protein, vitamins, and minerals. One of the most important features of this product is that it isn’t perishable.

Plumpy’nut succeeds where powdered milk fails because it doesn’t require clean drinking water. In Darfur alone, this product has cut malnutrition in half. And according a piece in the N.Y. Times, Plumpy’nut can even be fed to babies to help jump-start growth.

Here’s the amazing part for the company: they sold $25 million last year alone by saving people’s lives. And what do they do with that money? They reinvest 80 percent of their profits into research and development.

So here’s a business with a heart the size of a home, making money while helping to end malnutrition. I believe this drives home the point (without making a quick pit stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp) we’re always trying to make at Progressive Wednesday: Baby, the end of big problems starts with small solutions.