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China-Africa Trade Information Service
Finding the right baby cereal manufacturer can be challenging. In Cameroon when one is looking for a high quality infant cereal, he cannot make a better choice than the locally made cereal. Madame Pascaline Nenda a Cameroonian entrepreneur produces locally-made commercial infant cereal.She named this locally-made infant cereal baby food made made from fruits,soya, wheat, milk and sugar Blesolac.
This locally-made infant cereal baby food is made by boiling and roasting soya beans which are later ground into powder. She then mixes the soya powder with other cereals to make the baby meal. Pascaline started her business five years ago to counter imported brands, which she says are generally expensive and contain preservatives.
As we knew from six months, breast milk is not enough to feed a baby. When she traveled to her village, her husband noticed that the women in the village ate roast wheat and fed it to the children to help them grow. So she had an idea to use the same wheat and make something else with it and after several trials she come with a locally-made infant cereal baby food which she called Blesolac. Currently about 1.2 million of children in Cameroon have stunted growth and about 45 percent of child deaths are linked to under nutrition.
She works with various baby clinics in the city where she also introduces her products to mothers.She sells about 150 kilogrammes of Blesolac a week, but says she would be able to process more if she had the right equipment and financing.
Pascaline said “The challenges are many because first of all there isn’t enough equipment for manufacturing. When I started selling, I was going from door to door trying to market what I was selling, which was not easy. I was packaging the product in transparent plastic bags,”.
Pokam Nadege’s seven-month-old baby recently started weaning and Blesolac is one of the foods in her diet. Nadege said when she heard about Blesolac, she went and bought it and she tasted it and she also liked the smell. she gave it to the baby, and she liked it and she eats it with no problem.