Interview with elimentaire sarl.
Innovation Against Poverty
Interviews
At the 2012 Innovations Against Poverty Conference and Awards, we interviewed Andreas Renner from elimentaire sarl.'s Moringa-based food additive venture in Madacasgar.
elimentaire sarl. produces a high concentrated powder from the leaves of the Moringa tree. Our aim is to use the incredible properties of the Moringa tree to produce food additives which help to fight malnutrition. First Madagascar, but we’re ambitious, we want to go beyond.
What is innovative about your product?
The Moringa tree originated from India. It was introduced to Madagascar more than 150 years ago. There are some NGOs which work with the communities to help to talk about the beneficial properties, because you can pick the leaves and cook them like spinach, like a vegetable. But there has never been a company who has actually said that we can do more, we can commercialise this product, we can do something which can introduce it to market to help increase the benefits to a much wider range of people.
What markets are you targeting? How will you reach them?
The aim is to reach people with a very low budget, the base of the income pyramid. And what we do is - we don’t want to reinvent the wheel – we are looking out for partnerships with organisations that already have access to those groups. One of the key lessons to learn is how to target different groups with different pricing segments. So, there is one segment with organisations who produce ready to use therapeutic foods, like little sachets of high nutrient food parts, which they distribute for disaster relief at quite a high market price. And then there’s the market segment, for the fortified flour with the group of companies who produce biscuits, the school meal producers, the baby milk producers; and they reach out to quite a large proportion of the population, including the lower-middle class, which is near the base of the pyramid. And then of course you also work with farmers, because Moringa can be used as an animal feed. Then we can also add the fibre to make it a more product, that has a positive impact on the production of the milk and the quality. So, there are a lot of different avenues to take to reach out to many, many people to benefit from this exciting product.
What kind of challenges does elimentaire sarl face?
I think we love to seek the big challenges, so going to Madagascar, which is a difficult country from an investor’s point of view because of the unstable government what we have there at the moment and going for a product which has not yet commercialised. So, it’s a new product, from an underutilised species, and going forward the target for us is low budget, so we are tripling the challenges and that’s something we are struggling with... But I think through the partnerships, through the support from the Sida programme, and the highly committed team we have, we are in a good way to move forward.
