How an Indian RUTF manufacturer is supporting Sudan’s emergency response

Sudan’s civil war is driving a severe nutrition crisis, and humanitarian systems are struggling to respond. According to UNICEF’s latest humanitarian situation report, an estimated 30.4 million people (up from 24.8 million last year) in Sudan are urgently in need of life-saving assistance. As many as 4,48,000 children were admitted for treatment of severe acute malnutrition across the country this year, including nearly 57,000 in September alone. Thousands of kilometres away in India, Akshat Khandelwal, founder and managing director of Nuflower Foods, watches his supply lines for life-saving therapeutic food get busier than usual, as agencies rise up to respond to the crisis. 

In 2025 alone, Nuflower Foods, a key manufacturer of Ready-to-use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) in India, has supplied more than 60,000 cartons to Sudan through its partnerships with UNICEF, the World Food Programme and other agencies, as part of global efforts to treat severe and moderate acute malnutrition in crisis-hit regions.

Through its flagship RUTF product, NutriFEEDO, the company processes, runs a heat step, and packs 90 to 100-gram pouches in pharma-grade clean rooms. The heat step—a pasteurisation process that takes the blended peanut-milk-oil mixture to nearly 90°C—kills pathogens like salmonella and ensures the paste is microbiologically safe. “The people it is going to are among the most disadvantaged in the world,” says Khandelwal, explaining the rigorous chemical, physical and microbiological testing each batch undergoes before release.

But manufacturing often meets a volatile humanitarian landscape, says Khandelwal. His team’s most urgent challenges arise when large, sudden orders arrive from global agencies. “Sometimes clients say they want 1,000 metric tonnes within a month,” he says. This entails sourcing raw materials, aligning packaging supplies, running extended production cycles and securing container space—all under intense time pressure. “The challenge for us is always on the supply chain; how to responsibly procure, how to assure quality, and how to produce in time,” says Khandelwal.

Once cartons are ready, packed containers are moved to inland depots and then to Mundra port in Kutch, Gujarat. “Reaching these places is relatively easy if you have the right network,” says Khandelwal. “The real challenge is from the mother warehouse to the last mile.” That journey into Sudan’s conflict-affected regions lies with UNICEF, WFP and other public-health agencies. “They have a huge network of field offices. They know what to do and what not to do,” he says.

In a conflict like Sudan’s, with port closures, communication blockages, blocked humanitarian corridors and shifting control of territory, even experienced agencies face interruptions. “Ports sometimes switch sides,” he says, referring to the way warring groups seize infrastructure. Shipments can sit idle for weeks, or agencies may ask Nuflower to pause production because their pipelines are temporarily blocked. “We have had to pile up products in our warehouses for months,” he says, recalling a previous crisis when containers could not move forward.

Despite these challenges, Khandelwal emphasises that humanitarian actors rarely obstruct food transport. “In our experience, aid is never really sanctioned or impacted by anyone,” he says. “When there is food moving around, even warring factions allow it because it is about saving lives.” But he reiterates that last-mile realities are outside his scope: “I am the manufacturing guy. The people who  handle that are the public-health institutions working there.”

Sudan is only one section of a wider demand map. Nuflower is also supplying to Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Gaza, where conflict, drought and displacement continue to drive acute hunger. “We are not prioritising Sudan,” he says. “We respond to demand; this quarter, a lot of demand is coming from Sudan.” High-profile conflicts, he notes, tend to create sudden spikes in orders. 

But urgency alone cannot bridge the widening gap between need and funding. “The requirement is increasing this year, but funding is coming down,” he says, referencing reductions in major donor budgets, including cuts to US humanitarian aid. With fewer resources to procure therapeutic food, agencies are being forced to cut or stagger orders. “We have supplied less than what we would have planned for earlier,” he says.

India’s capacity, however, has grown, says Khandelwal. “There is enough manufacturing capacity now to meet international requirements,” he says. But he also believes India can expand from being a supplier to becoming a strategic contributor. “One of the things India can do is step into the funding game; contribute to UNICEF missions, WFP missions, Red Cross missions. Our contribution should match the size of our economy.”

When asked about continuity of care in a conflict that shows no path to stability, he breaks it into two strands. “Continuity of care includes a curative element and a preventive element,” he says. The curative side relies on a reliable supply chain and adequate funding; the preventive side depends on stabilising governance, reviving agriculture and restoring food systems. “RUTF addresses the immediate problem,” he says. “But prevention is development.”

For now, as ports open and shut unpredictably, frontlines shift, and communication blackouts isolate entire regions, cartons continue to move cautiously but persistently. Khandelwal remains measured about his role in this chain. His company’s work may not alter the course of Sudan’s conflict, but it can help stabilise a child’s chances of surviving it, he believes. And in a crisis where so many systems have collapsed, that small continuity is what India’s manufacturers can most reliably deliver.