Home-cooked food isn’t just good for health, it’s also good for business. In Ethiopia, 2SCALE support is helping women entrepreneurs expand the range and quality of foods they make and sell. The program focuses on selected woredas in western Tigray and the Gondar zone in Amhara. These areas host large numbers of seasonal migrant laborers working on sesame farms – a huge market for healthy, affordable traditional foods.
In partnership with the Food Science and Nutrition Society of Ethiopia, we’ve developed ‘fortified’ variants of traditional foods, for example adding soybean to sorghum or wheat flour to increase protein content. We looked at a number of foods: injera, ambasha, kitta, bonbolino, souse and others. For each, we developed and tested alternative recipes with slightly different blending ratios. The products were taste-tested with rural communities, and analyzed in the laboratory for cooking quality, nutritional value and other parameters.