Salem at Edesia’s Providence facility. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

It’s the first week of September and Navyn Salem, like any mother of four, is juggling. The executive director of Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions, she’ll be leaving work early to take a daughter to Brownies; her husband, Paul, a private equity financier, is in Dubai on business; and she’s making meals for hungry children—7,000 an hour, 21 hours a day.

Those meals—sweet, peanut-based, fortified pastes packaged in foil packets that can be stored safely without refrigeration for up to 24 months—are distributed under the name Plumpy’nut, and they have been credited with near-miraculous results in treating severely malnourished children in 17 countries, from Sudan to Haiti. Before-and-after photographs on the walls of Edesia’s Providence, Rhode Island, plant show skeletal infants transformed into thriving toddlers in four to six weeks.

Graduating with a major in communication, Salem later worked as a marketing executive at the online employment and advertising company Monster.com, ultimately heading a division. During a 2007 trip to her father’s homeland of Tanzania, and by then a parent herself, she saw firsthand the effects of Plumpy’nut—which at the time was produced solely by a French company called Nutriset—and its potential reach. “The need was just overwhelming,” she recalls in passionate but carefully modulated tones.

She founded the nonprofit Edesia with seed money from her husband, a $2-million USAID grant, and a licensing deal with Nutriset. Edesia’s Rhode Island facility opened in March 2010, satisfying a U.S. law that requires domestic production of relief materials funded by USAID. Salem built her second factory in Tanzania, reasoning that Edesia could help create jobs and a market for the local peanut crop. The Tanzanian plant began operating in December 2010. Edesia’s products are sold at cost, and the company is now “fully sustainable on sales alone,” says Salem.

Ask Salem about a typical day, and she laughs. It could include a product development meeting (Edesia now also manufactures three nutritional supplements, including Plumpy’doz for the very young), sales calls to prospective clients such as the United Nations World Food Program, or networking at the annual meeting of a global aid group in New York. “There are always challenges,” she says. “Just because you’re feeding malnourished children, the world doesn’t give you a free pass.”

Thomas Christopher is a Connecticut-based writer.

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