Meds & Food for Kids (MFK) is dedicated to saving the lives of Haiti’s malnourished children and other nutritionally vulnerable people.

They accomplish their mission by developing, producing and distributing highly nutritious foods, including the gold-standard Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF).  They make their food products in Haiti, using Haitian workers and, whenever possible, Haitian raw materials. Haitians call their RUTF “Medika Mamba” — or “Peanut Butter Medicine” in Creole.

Dr. Patricia B. Wolff has been providing medical care in Haiti to those in need for more than 25 years. But Dr. Wolff kept running into the same issue with the kids she was treating there: they were so chronically malnourished that they kept getting sick. “It was like spitting into the ocean,” she recalls.

A Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University’s School of Medicine, Dr. Wolff founded Meds & Food for Kids in response to her frustration of watching malnourished Haitian children needlessly die. After visiting RUTF pioneer and Washington University colleague Dr. Mark Manary in Malawi, Dr. Wolff realized that this was the solution and was inspired to transfer the best-practice therapy of RUTF to Haiti in 2003.

To date, MFK has treated over 145,000 children, trained over 1,700 farmers and provided jobs to almost 50 Haitians. In 2012, MFK opened a new state-of-the art factory just outside of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, with the capacity to treat 80,000 children per year. More recently, MFK has begun the exportation of life-saving Medika Mamba to countries like Guatemala and Senegal, with plans to continue to expand exportation in 2015 and beyond.

MFK is a registered non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation in the United States and a registered Non-Governmental Organization in Haiti.