Brand values: Leadership, Integrity, Flexibility

Brief: The Nutrient Gap Initiative is an umbrella program for Bayer to help people in underserved communities get access to essential nutrients. Past years have focused broadly on underserved communities, which will continue. In 2023, we intentionally focused on smallholder farmers given their health plays an important role in protecting food security and the livelihoods of many people living in low-and-middle-income countries.

Objective: Develop an ongoing, sustainable program that also meets the unique needs of smallholder farmers in rural communities to tackle malnutrition.

Starting with trust was essential to creating a sustainable program. Smallholder farming communities are insular. The communities are in remote locations and outsiders are noticeable. In order to make a meaningful impact, we needed to integrate our programming into the existing smallholder community infrastructure leveraging existing trusted sources to help overcome the barriers to achieving a nutrient-adequate diet.

Step 1: Determine the barriers. While there are cultural nuances, we defined 3 key reasons why smallholder farmers could not access vitamins and minerals

1. Physical or financial availability: Nutritious food and nutritional supplementation is not affordable and/or available in local stores

2. Lack of understanding: Community members don’t understand that they need vitamins and minerals to be healthy or how you can get adequate essential nutrients

3. Inadequate policy or health system recommendation to help improve access and standards of care

Step 2: Determine partners. We identified the following partners to design and deliver actionable solutions based on local needs, with local trust: Vitamin Angels, reach52, Better Life Farming Centers

Step 3: Customize: Working with partners, we developed targeted programs marrying localized barriers, infrastructure and cultural nuance, from Indonesia, India, to Kenya, South Africa, and Mexico.

We prioritized three areas for quick impact. Programming rolled out throughout 2023, in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

1. We provide affordable and accessible sustainable solutions to smallholder farmers. We created a knowledge transfer initiative, featuring a digital platform that provides tools for smallholders to improve their ability to grow fruits and vegetables for their communities; donated 2,000+ kilos of vegetable seeds.

2. Improved access to prenatal vitamins to ensure healthy pregnancies and birth outcomes for women in underserved communities, many of which in rural areas: we partnered with NGO Vitamin Angels to engage local clinics to improve maternal nutrition education and distribute multiple micronutrient supplementation (MMS), the scientifically-proven WHO recommended prenatal vitamins, to 4M women and their babies in 2023.

3. Improving nutrition education: we partnered with reach52 to train 1,300+ community health workers in bespoke nutrition education programs, from food to supplementation, who engaged 150,000 beneficiaries and donated vegetable seeds

We expanded access to vitamins and minerals for 30 million people in underserved communities (vs. 19M in 2022) including: 4M women and their babies with MMS; 10M people with affordable supplementation; 16M smallholders with sustainable solutions to grow fruits & vegetables. We donated ~2,000 kilos of seeds across 10 vegetable crops (~$600,000 of commercial value). With reach52, we trained community health workers to engage 150,000 community members, driving 46% to visit a health center for care.

With Vitamin Angels, we co-created a continuous medical education curriculum for healthcare providers and engaged with local governments to adopt MMS as the standard of care.

Despite post-Covid headwinds, we achieved our sales target for supplements. We increased revenue from fruits and vegetables smallholders business by 7% YOY (forex adjusted growth). Overall, we met our sales target for 2023.

Bayer was ranked #1 on Nutrition on the World Benchmarking Alliance Food & Agriculture Index (vs. #23