Zinc fortification

My first day at work was anything but the typical orientation day that I've had at other jobs. I jumped right into the study-in-progress and drove with the project coordinator to Les Grands Moulins (LGM), the largest flour miller in Dakar to fortify a small batch of cereal with zinc for the study. LGM produces flour for 70% of Senegal and it's an enormous operation. There's a baking school upstairs from where we were working that morning, and I learned how to scratch the tops of the baguettes before they went into the oven - cutting lines into the tops of the dough using a knife - and I got a kick out of it, simply because there's clearly a technique to it that separates the professionals from someone like me. We hung around a bit, hoping that the bread would be finished before we had to leave, but no dice that day.

We brought with us 4 buckets of locally-produced infant cereal that is an iron-fortified complementary food (meaning it's fed to infants who are breastfeeding and eating solids) and mixed in two different quantities of zinc (so that we'll have two cereals: high zinc and low zinc) using a cement mixer that's never been filled with cement. I was partially covered in flour by the end of the morning but it was fascinating to see how's it done since food fortification is a low-cost approach for providing essential micronutrients.