How I built a machine that feeds millions | Felix Brooks-church

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Salt, cooking oil, flour. Ingredients that are in most kitchens almost everywhere in the world. Staples that are so basic, and for many of us, they can easily be taken for granted. But social entrepreneur Felix Brooks-church sees them as something else, an untapped way to get essential nutrients to people who might otherwise go without.

0:33Felix Brooks-church: If you want to get nutrients into people, the most efficient way isn't to change the food that they eat, but instead to improve the daily food that they already rely on. Felix works on food fortification, which is the practice of adding vitamins and minerals to common foods to increase their nutritional value. It's not new. Think iodized salt or fortified bread. But as Felix shares in his talk, In many parts of the world, the food system still doesn't deliver nourishment to the people who need it most. Kids can have full stomachs and still be missing the nutrients their bodies and brains need to grow.

1:08Felix Brooks-church: Bellies are full, but full bellies are not enough. If you're only eating that starch, which is often the case, you're literally starving from lack of nutrients. That's why it's called hidden hunger. He shows how a small device installed in local flour mills is helping to fight hidden hunger at a massive scale and how starting with everyday foods can help millions around the world. And stick around. We caught up with TED guest curator Angus Hervey with more on Felix's work and why this kind of quiet, practical progress deserves more of our attention. That's coming up right after a short break.

1:49This episode is brought to you by Dell. Back to School starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop, powered by Series 3 Intel Core so you can work from anywhere. Now starting at$699 with exclusive student pricing starting at$599. And it's lightweight, portable, and packed with enough processing power to make multitasking a breeze. So say goodbye to distractions and hello to more free time because you finished your work faster. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and more must-have electronics and accessories. Limited time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you at dell.com slash deals.

2:29That's dell.com slash deals.

2:35This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card puts the power of titanium in the palm of your hand. What does that mean? It means the power to earn unlimited daily cash back on your purchases every day. It means a materially different credit card accepted anywhere in the world. MasterCard is accepted. Ditch the plastic. Upgrade to titanium. Apply in the Wallet app on iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Terms and more at AppleCard.com. This episode is brought to you by Walmart Business. The best leaders might tell you the work that moves an organization forward doesn't happen in spreadsheets or supply chain emails.

3:15It happens when you have the space to think big. That's the idea behind Walmart Business. It's built to take the friction out of running an organization so your team isn't losing hours to procurement logistics when they could just be focused on the problems that actually matter. With an ever-expanding business assortment, everyday low prices, and fast, reliable shipping, Walmart Business keeps your operations running smoothly. Shop online, in-store, or through the Walmart Business app, however works best for you. Simpler operations, smarter spending. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account at business.walmart.com.

3:59And now our TED Talk of the day.

4:02Felix Brooks-church: I'm willing to bet that all of us this week ate a meal that contained at least one of these ingredients. Salt, edible oil, flour, no matter where you live in the world you're cooking with that that's the foundation of everything we eat that's why it's called staple foods and that's why they're so important if you want to get nutrients into people the most efficient way isn't to change the food that they eat but instead to improve the daily food that they already rely on that's the idea and that's the idea behind food fortification something I know a lot about we probably all benefited from this already this morning and didn't even realize it.

4:46Felix Brooks-church: If you ate eggs, cooked in oil, that oil had vitamin A. Had toast, that bread had zinc and iron. Even the salt that you sprinkled onto that breakfast was iodized. This isn't some overly processed GMO approach. This is simple, safe, proven science. It's about 100 years old. In fact, malnutrition caused by lack of nutrients has all but disappeared in countries where food fortification works. But only works where the system works. And unfortunately, in many countries in the global South, that system is either broken or non-existent. A farmer grows a crop like maize. A miller buys that grain, grinds it into flour.

5:29Felix Brooks-church: A mother buys that flour, takes it home, feeds their kid. Bellies are full, but full bellies are not enough. If you're only eating that starch, which is often the case, you're literally starving from lack of nutrients. That's why it's called hidden hunger. It's a big one. It affects 3 billion people. And of course, kids suffer most. Stunting. Delayed brain development. Lifelong deformities. And today, unfortunately, thousands of kids will die from preventable sickness and illness. But there is hope. And there's some incredible people working on very innovative ways to solve this problem. This is my buddy Kurt in Guatemala.

6:09Felix Brooks-church: His company, Samia Nueva, is on the forefront of biofortification, helping farmers to grow nutritious crops from the start. Jahil, one of my board members, based in Kenya, his company, Hello Tractor, is connecting farmers with mechanization and digital platforms, increasing yields and livelihoods. It's like the Uber for Tractor. Super cool. My other buddy, Gayatri, based out of Rwanda, her company, Earth Enable, is replacing dirt floors in village homes with more sustainable materials, ensuring kids don't get sick and can actually absorb the nutrients they deserve. Different approaches, same mission.

6:47Felix Brooks-church: So as Kurt and Jahil sit at the farm and Gayatri at the family, where do I fit? Here, at the mill, in the middle, between where food is grown and food is consumed. At Sanku, a social enterprise I co-founded with David Dotson, the aha moment was, if we could build a machine that sits on that green mill and adds nutrients into the flour, we're going to fortify the entire village. And credit to David, who saw this super early, over 20 years ago, that although individually small, these mills, about the size of a bedroom, collectively, thousands of these mills feed entire nations. And so now fortification is not a nice-to-have.

7:30Felix Brooks-church: It is a basic human right. So with that inspiration, with that vision, I took off to Kathmandu and landed there in 2010 to do just that, to build these prototypes. Over the course of the year, I broke a lot of things. I failed forward. And after a year, I built the one that kind of worked. That year took a big toll on me. That was rough. I've recovered. So I had the confidence now in something that kind of worked. I thought, well, let me head to East Africa and test it there to ultimately scale across continents. And I landed in Dar Salaam, Tanzania. And within a matter of days, after visiting some mills, I didn't have an aha moment.

8:08Felix Brooks-church: I had an ah crap moment. Those mills were completely different. And so my machine didn't work there. I had to go back to the drawing board. I spent an entire year on this dirt floor metal shop, banging out devices until I had something that could be installed. I covered hundreds of mills across East Africa, literally dragging that machine across borders, meeting hundreds of millers, and learning from them and co-designing. because we knew if it could work here in a village in Nepal, in a village in Malawi, in Tanzania, in Kenya, it could work anywhere. And by 2015, we had our machine. They commercialized it.

8:43Felix Brooks-church: We call it the Sanku Dossifier because it doses. And it's super simple, super lightweight, and automates the process of adding life-saving nutrients into the flour that people eat every single day. The way it works is simple. The miller adds raw grain into one side. in the dispenser is a condensed powdered form of nutrients. Just think about your daily vitamin. If you were to crush that up, it becomes powder. Exactly the same thing. As that raw grain flows out of our machine and into the mill, that loss of weight is detected and automatically triggers a little feed screw to turn and dose a precise amount of premix every single time.

9:18Felix Brooks-church: Those nutrients and that grain flow together and gets mixed in the actual mill and out comes fortified flour. It's that simple. So we weren't just building a machine. We were also trying to build a company. And there was tens of thousands of mills. So operationally, we couldn't have thousands of staff and thousands of vehicles driving around all of East Africa aimlessly looking for mills, trying to figure out which ones to fix. And so again, we turned to technology. We installed SIM cards, just like from your phone, in each and every one of our dossifiers. So real-time production can flow through the nearest cell tower to our devices.

9:53Felix Brooks-church: We know exactly where the mills are, how much they're producing, how much nutrients they're adding. Is it accurate? Does that machine need fixed? That operational efficiency allowed us to scale. And by 2020, we reached our first milestone, reaching 1 million people in Tanzania.

10:13Felix Brooks-church: It gets better. Right around that time, Mackenzie Scott found us, loved what we did, gave us a big$8 million unrestricted grant.

10:25Felix Brooks-church: There are good billionaires, trust me. Now, her generosity was beyond catalytic, not just because of the size of the grant, but because of what we decided to use it for. We could have easily thrown it out of our overhead, out of our burn rate, it would have been eaten up within three years. But we invested in future. We invested in infrastructure. We hired an all-African exec team for leadership and expertise. We built East Africa's first nutrient-premix factory to reduce our cost at scale. We further developed the technology and systems for scale, not just to reach a couple million people, but soon tens and hundreds of millions of people.

11:01Felix Brooks-church: And we built a lot of dossifiers, over a thousand, scaled throughout Tanzania, expanded into Kenya, and last year into Ethiopia. And grew from reaching that one million people to today, reaching 75 million people every single day.

11:21Felix Brooks-church: I told you, it's going to get better. So as a social enterprise, we recognize this is a big problem, and it's not just our responsibility to solve. And so we're not just trying to build a company, we're trying to build an industry, and we need partners. And we work very closely with the governments in the countries we operate in. We work with them to pass stronger policies mandating fortification. We upskill their labs with better equipment and protocols so they can accurately test flour in the market. We even train their food inspectors and give them tools so they can regulate the entire industry.

11:52Felix Brooks-church: This is our systems change piece, and this is what's going to get us to truly scale. And so we're about 24 months away from our original goal of reaching 100 million people. And so Linoside is there, and as you approach a goal or achieve a dream, you've got to start thinking bigger. And we do have a new vision. This is actually the first time I'm announcing it publicly. We have a new vision that we call the 10-10-1. Over the next 10 years, we're going to scale to 10 countries and reach 1 billion people.

12:29Felix Brooks-church: Any number with a B is audacious, but that is the point. There's a sense of urgency, and within the context, the governments now are mandating fortification across Africa and Asia. The system is starting to work. The machine works, the model does too. And every day I drive to work, I see it in real life. every day I come home I see it working as well this is Leo Leo is my son and he loves dinosaurs just before I flew here he was telling me about his latest favorite one the stegosaurus that's the one with the big plates and the spikes Leo is autistic and because of his autism he has an extreme eating disorder and for many years all he would eat was pancakes perfectly round perfectly brown pancakes, flour.

13:19And because of his autism, he was wasting away in front of us,

13:25Felix Brooks-church: completely non-verbal, aloof. And so my wife, Leah, she actually works with us. And what she did is the obvious thing and the simple thing. She added the vitamins and minerals that was missing from Leo's body into that pancake mix. It didn't change the look, the taste, the color. That's how fortification works. It's invisible. But the results were extremely visible. He got strong. He woke up. He started to speak. This is a kid a couple years ago who couldn't say a single syllable. Now he's teaching me about the stegosaurus, right? Trust me, there is...

14:09Thank you.

14:10Felix Brooks-church: There is a long, long journey of speech therapy food therapy, special tutoring he's got a team, he needs a team but it's been an absolute privilege to witness what a simple thing like adding vitamins and minerals to a kid's pancake how that can change his life think about what that can do for millions of other children Leo finally went to school last year and as of very recently me and Leo are proud parents of a graduate it.

14:45Felix Brooks-church: It's kindergarten. It's kindergarten, but it's the first step. It's a milestone. We'll definitely take it. And we're very proud. And to watch him grow has been amazing. Three billion people suffer from this hidden hunger. And so this is not somebody else's problem. This is all of us. Thank you.

15:12You were listening to Felix Brooks Church at TED 2026. And now, here's journalist and TED guest curator Angus Hervey with some behind-the-scenes stories on Felix and why this idea matters right now. My name is Angus Hervey. I was one of the guest curators for TED in 2026. And when we were thinking about people that belonged on the TED stage, one of the first names I thought of was Felix. I first came across his work a few years ago, and I was struck instantly by both the simplicity and elegance of his solution, these incredible machines, these dossifiers, but also the power and impact of what they're doing in the world and the incredible reach that he and his team have managed to achieve.

16:00it's one of my favorite hidden stories of progress in the world right now something that addresses a problem that most of us don't really know about or aren't aware of and yet does so in a way that i think is so mechanical that part really strikes me so often when we think about technology and we think about innovation we think that it needs to come in some kind of digital form or you just chuck AI at it. But the DOS fire is such a mechanical thing. And yet it is able to reach so many different people, 75 million people and climbing. In working with Felix on this talk, one thing that became pretty obvious to me early on was that he's got a really great answer to the question of how do you change the world?

16:48Is it one person who does it through sheer force of will, the kind of archetypal hero of so many of our stories, or is it systemic change, something that hundreds, maybe thousands of people need to work on? And the beauty of Felix's story is that the answer, of course, is both. I don't think there's any doubting his force of will. I remember him telling me stories of how in the early days with Sanku, he literally had to drag those machines across borders and through sand and physically manhandle them around the African continent, demonstrating them to various different stakeholders. But I think what's perhaps even more powerful is how he talks about how he's part of a bigger systemic change, that there are so many people working on this problem, and that he and they are thinking all the time about how they plug in and how they support and are a part of the bigger effort.

17:45What I wasn't expecting when we started this process was to hear his personal story. And it strikes me as almost mystical, something perhaps that belongs to belief in some kind of bigger power. How is it possible that a person sets up more than a decade ago to solve a problem for the world, and then it turns out that that solution was something that they needed in their own household? And yet it turns out that that was the exact solution he needed as a father for his son. I don't know how you explain that. But I think those kinds of moments and those kinds of stories are what makes TED so incredible.

18:24And I'm so thrilled that the TED community and the millions of people that belong to it have had a chance to hear that story. And I was really honored to play a tiny part in helping that to happen. there is something about Felix that I think you can probably detect both in his voice and in the way he conducts himself on the stage something that you can sense and that thing is congruence that the story that he is telling himself inside is the same as the story that he is telling the world on the outside and it also matches up to his actions I think that people like this. They're not performing for us.

19:03They're here to tell us a story. And those are my favorite types of people. And ultimately, I think those are the people who are the greatest force for good in our world.

19:14If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

20:20We'll see you next time. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

20:33On the FT News briefing, we unpack the biggest news stories happening in finance, business, and the markets. If we have hostilities that curb oil supply again, the world will be less able to counter it. So the price effect on the oil market could be so much worse. The FT News Briefing brings you all the news you need in just 10 minutes. You can find the FT News Briefing wherever you get your podcasts.