From May 17th to May 25th, Suzanne Langlois, Interim CEO, and Remenson Tenor, Director of Manufacturing Operations, attended two strategic meetings in Rouen, France organized by Nutriset for the PlumpyField network partners.
The PlumpyField network includes the 11 independent producers who, like MFK, manufacture ready-to-use nutritional food, used for the treatment and prevention of malnutrition. MFK has been part of this network since 2010. Like MFK, most of these producers are located right in the countries where they are most needed: Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Fasso, Madagascar, and Guinea. By producing these products locally, we sustainably contribute to the social and economic development of our countries and to the fight against malnutrition.
Usually, the PlumpyField network organizes a yearly meeting for partners to focus on key challenges and define the strategic plan for the network’s coming year. However, due to the pandemic, the meeting has been postponed since 2019. Given that the network has not met for a very long time, we had two sessions. The first meeting was the market seminar in which all members came together to reflect on the current issues such as competition, new product development, the customers/clients’ needs/expectations, and global supply chain issues. The second meeting covered the network’s needs, challenges, and common issues that we are facing.
While attending the meeting, we learned there are a lot of challenges we have in common. For instance, the supply chain disruptions, raw materials availability, and raw materials inflation are global issues we are all facing, as are some of our customers such as UNICEF and the World Food Program. We discussed many collaborative solutions to these problems.
