Legislative frameworks for corn flour and maize meal fortification

Abstract

Corn flour and maize meal fortification can benefit the consumer when the added nutrient contents are in amounts appropriate to address nutrient gaps. Legislative instruments (standards and regulations) are needed to provide guidance to the producers and food control authorities. We reviewed a number of national standards and regulations of fortified corn flour and maize meal and identified constraints; contrary to current belief, the practice of using minimum contents or ranges of nutrients has caused confusion, misinterpretation, and conflict, and should therefore be abandoned. On the basis of the findings, a model of fortification legislation is proposed, in which the additional content and the expected average nutrient content in a final product are recommended as the main parameters for quality control and enforcement. For labeling, the average content, or one adjusted to the expected content of the product at the market, can be applied. Variation in micronutrient contents should still be checked to ensure homogeneity but with adherence to clear procedures of sampling and testing, which should be part of the standards and regulations.Keywords: food fortification; corn flour; maize meal; micronutrients; fortification contents IntroductionFortification of corn flour and maize meal is one potential nutrition intervention for managing micronutrient inadequacies in countries where maize is a staple food produced industrially.1 These conditions are fulfilled in many sub-Saharan African and South American countries, where the fortification of this staple has either already started or is being considered.A program of food fortification should be guided by technical specifications that respond to epidemiological need 2 and to industry context of each country. Those specifications are gathered in standards and regulations, which are the most common legislative instruments applied to fortified foods.3 A few countries have also enacted laws for food fortification, although this practice is increasingly abandoned because of its rigidity in making timely modifications in response to changes in nutrition epidemiology or industry technological advances.The objective of this paper is to gather existent legislative instruments applicable to the fortification of corn flour and maize meal, to compare them, identify common limitations and constraints, and to propose a generic model that could improve the preparation of these technical and legal instruments. For the latter, this paper uses the estimations done for the case of Kampala, Uganda, in Guamuch et al., 4 in which details about how to use food and nutrient intakes to define nutrient contents in fortified foods are described. We explain in this paper how to calculate the values of several parameters that should appear in the legislative frameworks of fortified foods. These parameters are: the additional micronutrient contents that should be incorporated into the foods during the fortification process; the final average content and the allowable variation of contents at pr...

Status of commercial maize milling industry and flour fortification in Kenya

“…Commercial maize mills that produce packaged flour were purposively selected from each of the clusters (regions). Within Coast region and Western/Nyanza region, mills were sampled by census since these regions were dominated by the small retail mills that are not mandated by the government of Kenya (Fiedler et al, 2014;Makhumula et al, 2014). These mills made up the secondary sampling units.…”

“…The dominance of large scale mills in the Kenyan milling industry provides an opportunity to supply fortified flour to a larger population group. Large scale mills enjoy economies of scale in fortification thus low losses incurred in the implementation of fortification programs (Fiedler et al, 2014;Makhumula et al, 2014). The technology employed for milling varied with each category of mills but the processing steps were similar.…”

“…These challenges force mills to lie so that they can remain competitive in the market. According to Makhumula et al (2014), the imposition of mandatory flour fortification to all the mills risks collapse small scale mills that do not have the capacity to fortify (Makhumula et al, 2014).…”

“…Mandatory maize fortification was aimed to provide a sustained source of micronutrients relevant to the Kenyan population in addition to replacing some essential micronutrients lost during milling (Allen et al, 2006;Peña-Rosas et al, 2014). However, the success of the programme is yet to be determined as there is inadequate documented data on the maize milling practice and the extent of adoption of flour fortification programmes by the commercial mills in Kenya (Makhumula et al, 2014). This study was, therefore, designed to determine the characteristics of the maize milling industry and provide information on the status of flour fortification practice among commercial mills in Kenya (GOK).…”

Commentary: Food Fortification: African Countries Can Make More Progress

“…26, 36,37 • There should be appropriate fortification of foods used in food aid programmes, with donors being required to provide relevant nutritional information, particularly through adequate labeling.…”