New Market Opportunities for an Ancient Grain

Yolélé Foods is bringing the flavors of West Africa to the U.S. market through chips and pilafs made from fonio, an ancient grain native to the region. Cofounded by Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam and social entrepreneur Philip Teverow, Yolélé is a Brooklyn, N.Y.–based social enterprise that aims to make nutritious fonio more accessible to people in West Africa and beyond by building a supply chain for fonio, particularly through postharvest processing improvements and application development.

White fonio (Digitaria exilis) is considered an orphan crop, an underutilized indigenous crop significant to local or regional food security that has been largely neglected in terms of plant breeding and farming advancements. Resilient to hot, dry environments, fonio (like teff, amaranth, and grass pea) has also been called an opportunity crop for its broader potential in the face of climate change (Rockefeller Foundation 2024).

Rich in shortfall micronutrients, such as iron, and with significant amounts of methionine and cysteine (amino acids often lacking in grains), fonio has several nutritional advantages over rice, the dominant grain consumed in West Africa. Compared to rice, it also has a lower glycemic index, which can aid in diabetes management. Diabetes has become a public health crisis in sub-Saharan West Africa (Diawara et al. 2023), with research ramping up into malnutrition-related diabetes mellitus, a distinct type of diabetes associated with long-term undernutrition (Siraj et al. 2023).

A major challenge for Yolélé has been high postharvest losses due to fonio’s miniscule size (about 1 mm long), with around 50% of the grain typically lost during the manual threshing and dehulling steps. Working closely with a partner company in Mali that coordinates their fonio contracting (with nearly 1,000 smallholder women farmers) and provides field agents to train and organize the farmers, the company has found techniques to reduce fonio losses to about 20%.

After threshing and dehulling, the fonio is steamed (like couscous) to kill microorganisms, inactivate enzymes, and partially cook the grain for an instantized product that requires only a five-minute cook time by the consumer. Then the fonio is dried, either through air drying, with the grain on a screen and covered with cheesecloth, or in ovens, if they are available.

With the exported fonio, which is gluten-free, Yolélé has made chips, pilafs, and beverages, sold online and in grocery stores in the United States, Europe, and China, with the packaging telling the Yolélé story, including the nutritional and social benefits. Back in Mali, Yolélé is working on developing milling equipment and reaching out to local food companies that could use fonio as an ingredient, including manufacturers of flour mixes used by consumers to make “fufu”—a popular West African dumpling eaten with soups and stews. The company is also looking into building an aggregation center with processing capacity to produce ready-to-cook fonio (for use in pilaf and hot cereal), which does not currently exist in the market.

The Yolélé team believes its processing and marketing efforts can make fonio an appealing alternative to rice for West African consumers and hopes consumers will replace rice with fonio at least once a week. Besides improving nutrition, this would also boost farmer income, reduce the region’s reliance on imported rice, and expand the acreage of a climate-resilient crop.ft