Colourful Giggles is creating affordable, nutritious cereals made from local products
Imagine this: It's the middle of the night, and you wake up to the cries of your 6-month-old baby boy. Why: He's hungry and growing so fast that breastmilk is insufficient. But the electricity is out again. So, you cuddle him while you light a fire to heat water for porridge. Both of you are near tears by the time you can put some food into his tummy.
Colourful Giggles Nutrition is changing that scenario for babies, toddlers, and parents. Its cereals are ready-to-eat and don’t require any heating or cooking. Add cold water or milk, and you can feed your child a nutritious meal almost instantly.
Here's another situation to picture: You've been feeding your little girl imported baby cereal as her first solid food. It's fortified, but expensive. She's ready to start eating other food that you cook from scratch, but she doesn't seem to like the taste of anything. Mealtimes become a challenge.
Colourful Giggles is helping families avoid this, by making its cereals entirely from local ingredients - grains, fruits, and vegetables - that Nigerians find in their markets and stores and eat regularly. Add a nutrition pack to meet the daily needs of growing children, price it for affordability, and problem solved.
USADF-funded social and youth entrepreneur and founder of both Colourful Giggles Nutrition and Mother’s Delivery Kit, Adepeju (Peju) Jaiyeoba, didn't set out to go into manufacturing or the food business. Instead, she started her journey by focusing on the basics: keeping new mothers and babies alive. Nigeria's maternal mortality rate of over 900 per 100,000 births is among the highest in Africa, a situation that Mother's Delivery Kit has been working to reduce since 2014.
Peju's first company, Mother's Delivery Kit, has directly impacted over 1 million people, improving outcomes at birth. Mother's Delivery Kit provides affordable kits for women to give birth more safely and trains midwives, health care workers, and birthing attendants on safe delivery practices.
From its start in Lagos, Mother's Delivery Kit is serving women and families in 33 of the country's 36 states.
But Peju started asking herself, "What are we doing for the babies after they are born?"
Malnutrition and stunting are acute problems in Nigeria and across Africa, with under-nutrition due to deficiencies in vitamins and minerals an under-recognized part of these health challenges. Many people think that a fat baby is a healthy baby, but do not realize that babies that appear healthy are actually not getting the nutrition they need by eating ground corn or grain, for instance, and nothing else. Peju set out to tackle these problems by conducting research, testing products, assessing the market, and moving up the learning curve of food safety and regulatory requirements.
Like her first venture, Mother's Delivery Kit, Colourful Giggles Nutrition is grounded in health. A serving of Colourful Giggles Nutrition cereal provides up to 18 vitamins and minerals and goes a long way to meeting the recommended daily nutritional needs of growing babies and toddlers. The cereals are nutritious, healthy, and natural (there is never any salt or sugar added) and –equally important – affordable to millions of people since they are priced significantly less than imports and on par with local products that lack the micronutrients and value of Colourful Giggles.
Colourful Giggles Nutrition started selling its cereals online in April 2020, despite the disrupted supply chains and uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Parents and children need healthy foods now, not when it is more convenient for us to manufacture and distribute widely," said Founder Adepeju Jaiyeoba. "We were ready to start up production, so we did. Children can't wait."
Adepeju Jaiyeoba's vision goes beyond cereal and her home country of Nigeria. She plans to add processed fruit and vegetable packs to the product line and for Colourful Giggles Nutrition to be a Pan-African brand, improving the health and well-being of babies, children, and families across the continent. This young entrepreneur's title of "Director of Magic" encompasses the goals of creating healthy products and catapulting parents' dreams for their little ones to be well-nourished, safe, and happy.
Adepeju is truly saving and changing lives.
USADF awarded Adepeju Jaiyeoba with grant funding of $25K in 2014 for Mother’s Delivery Kit to mechanize and establish a distribution center in Central Nigeria, and of $50K in 2017 to expand into new states farther North. Peju has launched Colourful Giggles Nutrition with her savings, a dedicated team, and a lot of laughing children – including 16 mini-chefs for product validation.
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