PROVIDENCE — The Bezos family is giving up to $137 million to Edesia Nutrition, allowing the North Kingstown-based nonprofit to double its production, and provide more nutrient-packed food for malnourished children worldwide.
The family of Jacklyn and Miguel “Mike” Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is providing $127 million, plus a $10 million matching fund, to the social enterprise.
“More healthy and well-nourished kids mean a bright future for all of us,” Mike Bezos said, “and this investment in Edesia will allow them to reach even more children with this life-saving intervention.”
The funding will allow Edesia to feed 10 million children per year — doubling the 5 million children it’s on pace to feed in 2023, Edesia founder and CEO Navyn Salem said Friday.
“Ending malnutrition isn’t just a slogan. It’s our plan,” Salem said. “There are many problems in the world that we don’t know how to solve. Malnutrition is not one of them. We know what we need to do: Get life-saving food to children who are acutely malnourished or are at risk of becoming so. Thanks to this gift, Edesia is positioned to do just that. We can take these resources and mount a global malnutrition effort so that children don’t die from this preventable condition.”
Edesia, a nonprofit social enterprise named after the Roman goddess of food, partners with humanitarian aid groups such as USAID, UNICEF and the World Food Programme, and it has fed 22 million malnourished children since it formed in 2010.
Edesia plans to use the new funding to expand its North Kingstown facility to include more storage capacity, rail access, and production lines, and it will add at least 50 new jobs to the 150 it has now.
Salem said Edesia will use the money to focus more on preventing malnutrition.
“Plumpy’Nut treats the most severe cases of malnutrition when children are weeks away from dying,” she said. “We are building an entire factory floor dedicated to the prevention of malnutrition. It’s a totally different protocol, product, and way of distributing that will reach children much, much sooner and prevent them from needing to be in the hospital or from ever becoming severely malnourished.”
Salem said increases in armed conflicts and climate change are the biggest drivers of malnutrition. And the increased production will come as war is raging in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Edesia is urging governments to take the issue of malnutrition seriously.
“When the war in Ukraine cut off major food supply chains, it was a major wake-up call for many governments around the world,” Edesia said in a statement. “Climate change, conflict, and poverty impact food security every day. Edesia will continue to push global leaders to invest in sustainable and long-term approaches to meeting this challenge.”
Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @FitzProv.