Tailored Food: Nutritious Food for Everyone Everywhere

Globally, 735 million people suffer from hunger, with women and children bearing the brunt of its impact. The current structure of food systems disproportionately affects vulnerable communities who strive to provide nutritious meals for their families but are hindered by the lack of culturally-relevant, affordable, and nutritious food solutions. Large food processing companies, driven primarily by profit motives, benefit from the existing food system structure, while families living in extreme poverty, especially in countries like Liberia and Nigeria, struggle, having to spend more than 60% of their household income on diets of starchy staples and ultraprocessed imported foods loaded with sugar, salt, and fat. Unfortunately, accessible options for affordable, nutritious, and delicious foods are scarce, worsening issues of malnutrition. In Africa, where 1 in 5 people currently face hunger and 33% of the population live below the poverty line, rising unemployment and inflation of food costs, particularly for imported items, compound the challenges. Moreover, 60% of those facing hunger reside in conflict-affected areas, where extreme weather events induced by climate change further disrupt food production, affecting 95% of African farmers who rely on rainfall for irrigation.  

Existing food systems present formidable barriers to Africa's mission to reduce, and in the long-term, eradicate hunger. Despite the efforts of local entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses that uplift their communities, they encounter numerous obstacles. The annual $35 billion expenditure on food imports in Africa devalues local African food businesses, while monopolized markets increase the risk of disruptions by 30%, amplifying the vulnerability of smaller enterprises to supply-chain disruptions. Furthermore, a staggering 90% of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) lack the capacity to provide comprehensive support to small and medium food enterprises due to the unique operating context of entrepreneurs who operate in the informal economy, further impeding grassroots initiatives aimed at addressing these systemic challenges. In the face of these daunting realities, grassroots entrepreneurs cannot afford to wait any longer to confront these pressing issues head-on.  

Tailored Food works with small and medium sized grassroots entrepreneurs to research, design, and scale-up nutritious, delicious, culturally-relevant, climate-resilient food products, engaging in a range of food system transformation activities in the process. We have developed and scaled fermented cassava-based porridges in Liberia, banana-leaf wrapped protein bars in Congo, and plant-based ground beef in Brazil, while taking our approach to climate-resilient food systems transformation into the world’s largest food systems institutions – the UN World Food Programme, the World Bank, UNICEF, Save the Children, Unilver, and others.  

Tailored Food's solution to chronic malnutrition is a comprehensive approach that addresses the root causes of hunger while fostering sustainable, climate-resilient food systems. Through strategic partnerships with local stakeholders, we collaborate closely to research, develop, and scale up nutritious and affordable plant-based food products produced with crops resilient to climate change.  

Central to our mission is the empowerment of local entrepreneurs who are committed to addressing malnutrition in their communities. We identify and champion promising entrepreneurs, providing them with comprehensive support, including technical assistance, grant funding, and access to markets. By serving as steadfast, long-term partners, we help fill critical gaps in scaling businesses, securing finance, and accessing humanitarian markets, driving economic growth and resilience. Through these efforts, Tailored Food strives to eliminate hunger and improve the overall well-being of individuals and families living in poverty, while building a more sustainable future for all.  

Tailored Food's solution serves the 735 million people suffering from hunger, particularly targeting women, children, and low-income households across sub-Saharan Africa. By ensuring market access to affordable and nutritious food products, we directly address the root causes of chronic malnutrition, significantly improving access to vital nutrients and enhancing overall well-being in countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Liberia, and Cameroon, where the majority live below $5 a day. Our initiatives not only work to combat malnutrition but also positively impact health outcomes, quality of life for those in need, and climate change resiliency.  

Our support for local entrepreneurs plays a crucial role in stimulating economic growth within the communities we operate in. By fostering entrepreneurship and providing comprehensive support, including technical assistance and grant funding, we empower individuals to establish sustainable businesses, creating employment opportunities and driving economic development. Our collaboration with international organizations like UNICEF and WFP demonstrates our commitment to building partnerships and knowledge sharing on a global scale, allowing us to multiply the impact of our initiatives and benefit even more people worldwide.  

Tailored Food's emphasis on environmental protection further enhances our impact. By developing low-cost, nutritious plant-based alternatives and promoting regenerative agricultural practices, we not only combat food insecurity but also contribute to sustainability efforts. Through initiatives that empower local farmers and entrepreneurs to produce and distribute food locally, we reduce carbon emissions associated with transportation and promote environmental sustainability.

Tailored Food is a small, nimble team that centers our local entrepreneurs, farmers, food processors, and market shopkeepers as the decision makers, with a team of behind-the-scenes technical advisors supporting these decision makers. These include the following locally-led social enterprises: Kawadah Farm in Liberia, Mozambique School Lunch Initiative in Mozambique, BeNu Foods in Ethiopia, Veggie Victory in Nigeria, and Kayvey Nutri Foods in Cameroon. Our small but mighty team represents a wide variety of geographic, ethnic, and technical backgrounds, united around the goal of proving to the world that food systems based on nutritious low-cost food are not only possible, but profitable. Our team is led by Taylor Quinn, the Executive Director, who academically is a food anthropologist, and has been awarded Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for innovative approach to international development. Taylor has sold nutritious food products into the notoriously challenging humanitarian food aid market in multiple countries and built thriving businesses through the Ebola outbreak, corruption, periods of violent conflict and COVID-19. Tanya Mayo-Bruinsma is the Project Director and has spent over a decade working on the forefront of food, from food waste research and food recovery efforts in Europe to managing a zero-waste food service company. Tanya speaks 5 languages and holds an MSc in Environmental Technology and International Affairs from the Technical University and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. Nicole Riker is Research Director with over 8 years of experience across multiple sectors.  She has led research to launch innovative residency programs, developed and launched assessment tools while building disaster relief programs and worked to identify innovative solutions and entrepreneurs in the global food sector. Nicole has a BA in International Relations and holds an MSc in Sustainable Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). In addition to the core team members, Tailored Food employs locally based consultants on a project to project basis, from nutritionists in Ethiopia to market researchers in Kenya. Tailored Food's team is carefully crafted to meet the needs of the challenge at hand.

Tailored Food has been building sustainable food systems for the past 7 years. Our entrepreneur partners have sold over 6.3 million affordable, nutritious, delicious local plant-based meals to people suffering from chronic malnutrition. These nutritious meals are consistently reaching 33,800 malnourished people and have led to the creation of over 270 well-paying for women in rural communities we operate in. Tailored Food's founding thesis is that it is possible to profitably sell healthy, delicious plant-based food to the lowest-income families, having created over $783,000 in new economic value in low-income communities. Our entrepreneur model is currently operational across 5 countries; Liberia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Cameroon and Nigeria, with projects we have graduated in the Republic of Congo and Brazil, and food system transformation projects started in 13 new African and Latin American countries.

Tailored Food is applying to Solve with the aim of addressing specific financial, operational, and market barriers that come with making advancements within the plant-based food system sector. One major obstacle we face are technical constraints, limiting our ability to scale our portfolio of projects due to a small team size and limited operational systems that have been successfully as a small organization but will not be sufficient as we grow our operation and scale our impact. With better operating systems in palce, we intend to grow our team by bringing on full time members and systematize our model, enabling us to undertake more projects and expand our impact. Additionally, setting up low-cost business operations in new countries to promote our plant-based solutions requires substantial start-up capital. Through funding support from Solve, we could double the number of countries where we operate; expanding our reach and promoting tailor-made, plant-based meals on a larger scale.  

Despite our efforts, plant-based food systems often struggle to reach the mainstream food system movement. We aim to address this barrier by participating in more mainstream food system conferences in 2024, leveraging Solve's network and connections to amplify our message and connect with others, like us, within the plant-based food system movement.   

In the end, we hope to reduce funding spent on animal-intensive food systems, create plant-based meals that directly displace animal-based meals, and build a mainstream movement for plant-based food systems. Through Solve's support, we know we can overcome these barriers and accelerate the transition towards a more sustainable, nutritious, and plant-based food system globally.

Tailored Food pioneers sustainable, community-driven solutions to eliminate hunger and foster climate-resilient food systems. Our innovation lies in our commitment to sustainability and a holistic approach, addressing key pillars: bottom-up impact, long-term partnership, and nutrition-focused innovation.

1. Bottom-Up Impact: Identifying and supporting promising local entrepreneurs allows Tailored Food to create sustainable change from the ground up, ensuring interventions are culturally relevant and aligned with market needs.
2. Long-Term Partnership: Tailored Food's multi-decade engagement as a committed partner fosters stability, enabling true business growth and innovation over time.
3. Holistic Support: Providing a 360-degree range of support addresses diverse needs, bridging gaps in entrepreneurship, business scalability, and access to finance for small-scale food businesses.
4. Nutrition-Focused Innovation: Recognizing emerging market trends, Tailored Food prioritizes nutritional value, designing products responsive to local needs for urban low-income families, emphasizing both convenience and essential nutrition.

Alongside these key pillars, Tailored Food leverages frugal innovation to enhance our innovation efforts. We innovate with a nutrition-focused lens, designing products responsive to emerging market trends and local nutritional needs. By promoting frugal innovation, such as redesigning manufacturing equipment using locally available equipment components, we empower communities and promote self-sufficiency. Together, these pillars catalyze positive impacts, inspiring broader adoption of sustainable practices and reshaping the market landscape towards inclusive, resilient food systems.

Tailored Food’s solution holds the potential to make a profound impact on the challenge at hand through several key avenues:

1. Improves Well-being: Our approach addresses the root causes of chronic malnutrition. By providing affordable and nutritious food products, we directly contribute to reducing hunger and enhancing the quality of life for individuals and families living in poverty.
2. Economic Growth: Tailored Food’s support for local entrepreneurs and our emphasis on economic empowerment stimulates economic growth within the communities we operate in. 
3. Building Partnerships and Knowledge Sharing: Tailored Food’s collaboration with international organizations like UNICEF and WFP demonstrates a commitment to working together on a global scale.  Our innovative approach can be shared and replicated, exponentially benefiting even more people worldwide.
4. Environmental Stewardship: Tailored Food works to eliminate hunger for people living in poverty by developing, launching, and scaling delicious, low-cost, nutritious food products in collaboration with grassroots entrepreneurs, utilizing climiate-resilient crops. Tailored Food builds food systems that directly divert animal suffering, creating low-cost alternatives to high-cost animal-based dietary food staples.

We are confident in the transformative potential of our solution, as evidenced by the impact of our successful initiatives to date.

These achievements validate the success of our innovative strategy, and we are excited to continue expanding our impact and reaching even more individuals in need. We are just getting started on our journey to build sustainable, equitable food systems that prioritize the well-being of all.

Tailored Food exists to build case studies that show that achieving UN SDG2 of Zero Hunger is not only possible, but can be done through financially sustainable, grassroot entrepreneur, business models.

Tailored Food's impactful work to date reflects our commitment to creating sustainable change in communities facing extreme poverty. In Liberia, our model has successfully sold over 1,500,000 meals to families in need, positively impacting both local farmers and women in our processing facility. Collaborating with 90 smallholder women farmers and employing 7 women at the facility, we've also engaged 25 female market sales agents on a part-time basis, contributing to economic empowerment.

The Gates Foundation recognized our efforts by funding a research study, the comprehensive results of which we are eager to share. Our cassava-based flavored porridge, Power Gari, has been a success, priced at an affordable $0.06 USD per meal. Notably, 86% of existing customers express a desire to purchase more in the future, and 82% of households using the product are feeding it to their children, addressing critical nutritional needs.

Our product line, initially launched in school lunch programs in Liberia in January 2018, expanded to Liberian retail markets in February 2018. Despite facing challenges such as election violence, government corruption, and economic instability, our local partner, Kawadah Farm, has continued to sell products, demonstrating the resilience of our initiatives.

Our impact extends beyond Liberia. In 2018 and 2019, we collaborated with Africa's largest nutritious food processor, Africa Improved Foods, conducting a market research study on the food landscapes of Rwanda and Uganda. Subsequently, the United Nations World Food Programme sought our expertise, compensating us as consultants to build a business model, supply chain, and product line for their operation in the Congo. These accomplishments underline Tailored Food's dedication to making a meaningful difference and our ongoing commitment to creating positive change in diverse communities.

At Tailored Food, our core technology revolves around the concept of frugal innovation, where we apply simple yet effective technological solutions to address complex challenges in sustainable food systems. We embrace the notion that technology doesn't have to be complex to be impactful. For instance, instead of relying on sophisticated and expensive manufacturing equipment, we employ a frugal innovation approach. Within our technical development process  alongside our Liberia partner, Kawadah Farm, we tasked engineers with redesigning manufacturing equipment to be constructed by local motorcycle mechanics in Liberia using readily available parts found in motorbike repair shops.

This frugal innovation mindset allows us to overcome logistical and financial barriers while still achieving meaningful results. By leveraging locally available resources and expertise, we empower communities to develop and implement sustainable solutions tailored to their specific needs. Our approach combines modern technology with traditional knowledge systems, ensuring that our solutions are both innovative and culturally relevant. Through this blend of simplicity and effectiveness, we drive positive change in food systems, benefiting both people and the planet.

Full time: 3 (Taylor, Nicole and Tany)

Part time: 5 (Kaile, Adeline, Theo, Theresita, Kim)

Project based contractors: 2 (Navin, Nina)

8 years.

The Tailored Food team represents a wide variety of geographic, ethnic, and technical backgrounds, together united around the common goal of proving to the world that food systems based on nutritious low-cost food are not only possible, but profitable.

At Tailored Food, we prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout our project development and deployment processes. We recognize the importance of incorporating different perspectives, cultural understanding, and inclusive practices to ensure our projects are effective, respectful, and impactful. 

Our team takes an anthropological approach deeply immersing ourselves in the markets and communities we serve.  We engage with local stakeholders, including marginalized groups, to understand their unique challenges.  This inclusive approach allows us to develop solutions that are culturally relevant and tailored to local needs, with decisions and direction always led by entrepreneur leaders who live in the marginalized communities we work to serve.

We have a commitment to fair and transparent processes throughout project development and launch.  By engaging with grassroots entrepreneurs and local stakeholders, we empower individuals from marginalized backgrounds, providing them with the necessary support to succeed.

Internal to our team, our core values revolve around a deep respect, understanding and promotion of personal and cultural differences.

Tailored Food provides research, business building, and technical consulting services to entrepreneur partners and to the world’s largest food system organizations. We employ a unique process to identify solutions that are not only nutritious and delicious but also accessible, affordable, and culturally appropriate.

Solutions Mapping

• We take an anthropological approach to our research, fully immersing ourselves in the formal and informal food system dynamics in both urban centers, peri-urban, and rural communities to uncover insights and opportunities within a food system by spending quality time in conversation with producers, transporters, sellers, and consumers of food.
• We listen to indigenous knowledge and perspectives, building modern solutions from the basis of indigenous knowledge.
• Identify and learn from stakeholders who are positive outliers in their food systems.
• Collate data using collective intelligence, informing theories of change on which we develop our food products, market launch plans, investment cases, and strategic market partnerships.

Nutritious Food Product Development and Launch

• Design food system solutions that are entirely rooted in cultural norms in our focus geographies, ensuring minimal social behavior change is required.
• Create affordable food products aligning with local partners emphasizing capacity building, to ensure our projects are sustainable.
• Develop go-to-market strategies that leverage local influencers to promote new food products and health campaigns, from young hip-hop stars, influential market vendors, and local sports stars.

Scaling

• Working with our local partners to create and execute investment plans, with success raising both diluted and non-diluted investment capital.
• Provide end-end capacity support to small and large local businesses, increasing operational efficiency, identifying new business opportunities for our partners, and ultimately scaling impact.
• Promote private sector engagement outside of our core partners, working closely with national business associations, SUN Business Networks, and other industry groups, generating wider sector change beyond any one individual food product

We have a three-pronged approach to financial sustainability;   

Grants: our seed capital has been grant funding, in an amount that has enabled our organization to establish, expand, and standardize our operating model.  

Licensing fees: an incentive-aligned model, where we work as long-term partners invested in sustainable and profitable business development. We receive a small percentage of profit in exchange for our ongoing support.  

Consulting: Based on the hands-on experience Tailored Food has gained working with small-scale entrepreneurs, we also engage in consulting projects for larger organizations, with the profits being reinvested into expanding our impact.