New building will allow Edesia to add jobs, clients

GROWING APPETITE: According to Executive Director Navyn Salem, Edesia’s new Quonset facility will help the organization more than double its capacity. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON
GROWING APPETITE: According to Executive Director Navyn Salem, Edesia’s new Quonset facility will help the organization more than double its capacity. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL PERSSON

Traveling in her father’s native Tanzania brought home the enormity of the crisis caused by world hunger for Edesia Inc. Executive Director Navyn Salem. It was enough to convince the Barrington resident, whose professional experience was in advertising, to embark on a new career making peanut-based nutritional pastes for children.
With support from her husband, Paul Salem, an executive at Providence Equity Partners, Salem founded Edesia, a nonprofit manufacturer of Plumpy’nut, a nutritional paste patented by French firm Nutriset. After setting up a factory in Tanzania, Edesia agreed to become Nutriset’s sole partner in the United States.
By producing Plumpy’nut in Providence, Edesia can sell to the government agency USAID, which only distributes American-made products.
Last month, Edesia signed a 25-yearlease on a 10-acre parcel in the Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown, where the organization intends to build an 85,000-square-foot factory.

PBN: Why is Edesia moving?
SALEM: We are currently unable to answer the demand of our customers and there are so many high-level humanitarian crises around the world, due to a lot of civil unrest – such as Syria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Our customers, the international aid organizations, are requesting more and more and, because it is an emergency, we need turnaround time. It is really a matter of life and death.

PBN: How much will the new factory increase your capacity?
SALEM: We should be able to reach 2 million malnourished children. Right now we reach around 600,000 annually.

PBN: I assume a lot of your workers live in Providence now, is it tough to leave for them? SALEM: The centrality of Providence is an asset, but we couldn’t afford to stay here. That’s why a lot of manufacturing is not headquartered in Providence. There just isn’t a lot of inexpensive land in Providence. We have a 10-acre parcel in Quonset and it just makes more sense to move outside. Yes it could be challenging, but we hope to work on some transportation solutions to retain all of our staff.

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PBN: Aside from the standard Quonset lease incentives, did you get any assistance from the state?
SALEM: No other help.

PBN: What’s the timeline for this project?
SALEM: The hope is to get a shovel in the ground by Oct. 1 and move in by September of next year.

PBN: So is the new factory all about capacity or will it allow Edesia to do different things and perhaps move into additional products or markets?
SALEM: One of the opportunities we have is to look at innovation as a critical piece of our growth. We don’t like to sit back and look at how successful the current products are, but look at other vulnerable populations that could benefit from the expertise that we have. Traditionally we are making products for kids under the age of 5 in developing countries – but what about school feeding programs or products for pregnant mothers. Or what about children here in Rhode Island? Is there an application here?

PBN: How many new people do you expect to hire?
SALEM: It’s not that everyone shows up on the first day. We have a plan to scale up and raise capacity almost every year. We currently have 50 employees and my guess is we will scale up to 80 within that first year.

PBN: What new markets geographically are you looking at, and do you expect to be selling domestically in the near future?
SALEM: We have been shipping to 40 countries. We have shipped as far away as the Philippines with the typhoon, to Pakistan, Haiti, West Africa and I think really to every continent except Antarctica. Domestically we are starting very small with a pilot in Providence schools and will be working with Blessings In a Backpack to do a trial on something new.

PBN: Is Edesia now still heavily reliant on donations or at this point are you self-sustaining from sales revenue?
SALEM: So much of our energy is focused on efficiency and on trying to lower our prices so we can be 100 percent self-sustaining. That’s if we weren’t moving to a new home. That is why we need to launch a capital campaign to offset some of those costs. We ideally don’t want to add the building costs into the cost of Plumpy’nut. We’re not going to say kids on the brink of death are going to be paying for our building. So I would like to completely fund the building and new equipment through donations.

PBN: What is the estimated cost of the building?
SALEM: I have not gotten an estimate yet. We are working on the plans right now and finalizing the square footage. We probably won’t have an estimate for at least another month. But we are looking at 85,000 square feet and lot of that is warehouse. Warehouse is inexpensive to build. Factory floor is more expensive. My goal is to raise $3 million, which is a lot. But if people are interested they can come for tours, see what we are doing and get involved. •

INTERVIEW
Navyn Salem
POSITION: Executive director of Edesia Inc.
BACKGROUND: A native of Bloomfield, Conn., and mother of four, Salem worked in advertising before founding Edesia.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s in communication, Boston College, 1994
FIRST JOB: Helping out in a pet shop
RESIDENCE: Barrington
AGE: 42

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