Raising the Nutrition Bar With Bonbon Bouye

Students at Montana State University (MSU), with input from women farmers in Senegal, have developed a baobab peanut nutrition bar for Senegalese kids. Called Bonbon Bouye, which translates to “baobab delight,” this new product came out of MSU’s Food Product Development Lab (FPDL).

Lab Director and MSU Associate Professor Wan-Yuan Kuo and master’s degree student Edwin Allan designed this thesis project in 2018 with the aim of generating value-added income and enhancing nutrition in Allan’s native West Africa. U.S. nonprofit Bountifield International provided connections to women’s groups in Kaffrine, Senegal, where the research was done. In Senegal, women farmers produce 80% of the national food supply (IFAD) (while the men produce primarily for export).

In 2019, Allan and Kuo traveled to Senegal to conduct participatory action research, gathering insights from women farmers on available resources, dietary challenges, and food preferences. The process revealed the problem of high postharvest losses of cowpea and peanut (from inadequate storage, insect damage, and lack of postharvest processing options), suggesting an opportunity to reduce losses by including these crops in the product.

The women were most interested in the development of a baked snack for kids that would resemble the Senegalese peanut cake Kungutu but without the crumbliness, identifying softness and cohesiveness as important textural attributes. They chose Quaker Peanut Butter Baked Squares as a reference product to facilitate product development by the FPDL team. They decided that corn flour would be added for a more balanced amino acid profile, while indigenous baobab would boost vitamin and mineral content.

The unit operations would include milling the cowpea and corn into flour, roasting and grinding the peanuts, blending, molding, baking, cooling, and packing. The team’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points analysis identified the main food safety risks as microbial contamination during processing and aflatoxin contamination of the peanuts by Aspergillus flavus, which thrives in warm, humid conditions. For the incoming peanuts, the critical control points would be aflatoxin testing, sorting, roasting for 20 minutes at 177°C, and storing at relative humidity ≤70%, 25°–27°C, and for the finished product, baking to an internal temperature of 71°C for a 5-log reduction of Salmonella (Allan et al. 2020).

Back at MSU, Allan and a team of FPDL undergraduate researchers prepared prototypes of the Bonbon Bouye bar with varying ratios of cowpea, baobab, and corn. Allan and Kuo returned to Senegal in 2020 to conduct two rounds of acceptance testing, first with 149 adults who evaluated 12 prototypes, and then with 121 children aged 8–12 years who tried the top three choices from the prior round (Allan 2020). The children rated the samples 7.0, 7.4, and 7.7 (“like moderately”) on a 9-point hedonic scale (Allan 2020).

Based on the sensory results, Allan used response surface methodology to optimize the amounts of ingredients (cowpea flour, water, sugar, baobab fruit powder, peanut paste, canola oil, corn flour, baking powder, acacia gum, and salt), while ensuring acceptable water activity for commercialization. The resulting 120-gram nutrition bar is rich in protein, fiber, vitamins, calcium, and iron (Allan et al. 2023).

More recently, the African Development Bank has committed funding to build a small manufacturing plant in Ndangane, Senegal, to produce Bonbon Bouye in a facility with a layout designed by MSU chemical engineering students, under Professor Paul Gannon. This project will provide the opportunity for a sustainable business that can generate ongoing incomes for the women farmers.ft