Stakeholders Push for Better Laboratory Capacity for Fortified Food

Bennett Oghifo

Nigeria’s leading nutrition and regulatory stakeholders have renewed calls for stronger laboratory capacity, improved premix testing, and tighter industry compliance to safeguard the quality of fortified foods across the country. Fortified foods have one or more vitamin or mineral added when they are made.

These calls for tighter regulations were made at the 2025 National Fortification Alliance (NFA) meeting, held on Tuesday in Lagos, and attended by representatives from government ministries, regulatory agencies, development partners, industry groups, academia,civil society, and the media.

Hosted by the NFA in collaboration with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Helen Keller International (HKI) and TechnoServe, the meeting reviewed national progress in the fortification of widely consumed foods such as sugar, flour, vegetable oil, salt, and rice, key vehicles used to combat micronutrient deficiencies affecting millions of Nigerians.

Opening the meeting, NFA Chairman, Mr. Fred Chiazor, stressed that Nigeria’s large-scale food fortification programme cannot succeed without accurate, reliable, and harmonised laboratory testing.

He said, “Accurate premix and micronutrient testing is the backbone of fortification compliance. Stakeholders cannot improve what they cannot reliably measure.”

The representative of the Director-General of NAFDAC reaffirmed the Agency’s commitment to strengthening regulatory oversight and ensuring that fortified foods meet national standards.