When her baby was six months old, Dr Hemapriya Natesan found herself appalled by the sugary commercial baby food available. With her mother, she began to make batches of mullaikatiya sathumaavu, a traditional porridge for weaning infants in Tamil Nadu, southern India.
It’s a painstaking 10-day process with more than 15 grains, lentils and nuts. Many of the ingredients are first sprouted, then sun-dried in the sweltering heat before being slow-roasted, ground and sieved.
Natesan shared the old recipe on her blog, and parents from all over the country began to write to her, asking to buy the porridge. Four years on, her company, My Little Moppet, employs around 15 women making organic baby foods to order.
For decades, the only packaged baby foods available in India were wheat- and rice-based cereals such as Cerelac (Nestlé India) and Farex (Danone India). Natesan was wary of commercial formulations. In 2015, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention analysed more than 1,000 infant and toddler foods and found that on average, sugars contributed 47% of the calories in mixed grain and fruit foods.
“If we start weaning babies with these kinds of foods, they’ll like only processed foods later on,” said Natesan. Research suggests that her concerns are not unfounded. A study published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2016 found that higher consumption of commercial baby foods is associated with higher added sugar intake in preschool and primary school, relative to consumption of home-cooked foods.
Natesan is not alone. Other entrepreneurs have been setting up their own brands in India, and traditional weaning foods are now appearing on shelves alongside tins of Cerelac and Farex. There’s Early Foods’ sprouted whole grain porridges, Mimmo Organics’ pastas made from lentils and carrot, and Slurrp Farm’s dosa mixes made with finger millet and spinach, to name a few. “We just wanted to go back to feeding our kids what our grandmothers fed us,” said Slurrp Farm co-founder Shauravi Malik.
Dr Arun Gupta, a paediatrician and coordinator of the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India, said concerns about conventional baby foods are growing. India is home to more than 79 million children aged three and under, and the baby food industry is growing rapidly, at around 10–12% every year. According to India’s latest National Health and Family Survey, only 54.9% of infants were exclusively breastfed in their first six months. The consequences of increasing reliance on formula and commercial baby foods are manifold – from more cases of tooth decay in babies, to a correlation with lower intake of fruit and vegetables in school-age children, to childhood obesity. Although there’s little country-specific research, Gupta’s assessment of India’s infant feeding practices in 2018 found that only one out of 10 babies between the ages of 6-23 months gets the minimum acceptable diet.
Market leader Nestlé is aware of the issue. In an email interview, a spokesperson told the Guardian that “as part of our Eat Right campaign, Nestlé India has signed a pledge, where we are consistently reducing sugar in our products and reformulating our recipes. These efforts go beyond local regulations and are in line with the WHO’s recommendation to reduce the intake of sugars.” Nestlé did not offer specific details about these reformulated products, or when they would be made available.
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But parents like Natesan want more than corporate pledges and are turning back to alternatives rooted in traditional Indian foods and diverse ingredients, from amaranth and millet to mung beans and lotus seeds. Baby foods are boldly flavoured with spices such as turmeric, cardamom, caraway seeds, and pepper, many of which are believed to have medicinal properties and aid digestion. “They make the food tasty too, so we don’t need to add salt and sugar,” said Natesan.
But it comes at a cost. Gupta worries that the impact of this change is limited. Their small-batch products are about 20-30% more expensive than conventional baby food, which could stymie growth in a price-sensitive market like India. Made without preservatives, they also have a short shelf life, restricting their access to regular distribution channels, while commercial brands have a shelf-life of about 24 months.
But these entrepreneurs continue to expand and find ways to get their close-to-homemade products to more babies. Slurrp Farm, soon to launch a range of millet-based drinks for toddlers, has just expanded to the UAE, and later this year, they intend to bring their products to the UK. Priyanka Shetty Sridhar, of Mimmo Organics, plans to take her brand to Sri Lanka and the Middle East. “We want to tell mums everywhere we’re here, and we’re different. We’re doing things differently,” she said.
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