Learn how Mellace Family Brands and Mama Cares Foundation is working to feed starving children from crumbs!

CARLSBAD, Calif. (March 30th, 2010)-- Did you know that there are 178 million children in the world suffering from malnutrition? Or that 20 million suffer from severe acute malnutrition and only 3 percent receive the treatment they need? Mike Mellace knows, and it makes him sick — so he’s going all in to change it. Mellace is the president and co-founderof Carlsbad-based Mellace Family Brands, a nine-year-old company that makes snack mixes under the Mama Mellace’s Old World Treats, Mama Mellace’s Nut Hut and Snacktrition brands.

“We’ve always felt like the business has been our vehicle to do ministry,” Mellace explained. “We weren’t sure what that ministry was — we just knew that God gave us this business to do good with it. About 18 months ago the Lord made it clear to us what our mission is.” GodmanifestedMellace’sm ission with a video e-mailed to him by an employee from CBS’s 60Minutes about a Ready-to-use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) product and how it was being used to fight famine in Africa. But thisproduct has two strikes against it: it’s expensive and there’s not enough of it.

UNICEF estimates that in Africa alone there’s a need for about 200,000 tons of RUTF, but last year only about 16,000 tons were purchased because that’s all that were available. So Mellace looked at his nut business, looked at the need for RUTFs, and the proverbial light went on. He realized he could use peanut crumbs, a normal byproduct of his business, to make a better, less expensive RUTF. Through the Mama Cares Foundation (a foundation founded by Mellace), Mellace has developed Re:Vive, a fortified peanut-based RUTF. Re:Vive is loaded with vitamins and minerals and it does not require refrigeration, cooking, or water, making it ideal for Third World countries where vast numbers ofc hildren suffer from malnutrition. Re:Vive packs 550 calories into a 92-gram package, or a little more than three ounces. Each pack is the nutritional equivalent of a glass of milk and a multivitamin. Re:Vive means “to live again,” and the name is not a coincidence. A child who consumestwoorthreepacks of Re:Vive a day over the course of 30 days will go from death to life — literally. Without the product, the child typically has about a 10 percent survival rate, but withittheyhavea90percent survival rate.

Not content with his own Mellace took Re:Vive to the next step by enlisting the support of his vendors and customers. “It’s been an amazing journey for us,” Mellace said. “A number of the vendors we have relationships with, as we tell the story, they ask us how they can get involved. We’re also talking to our customers, and they’re all talking to their suppliers about trying to help minimize the cost that goes into the recipe. He also formed a partnership with World Vision to ensure that Re:Vive gets to the kids who need it most as quickly as possible. Now he’s looking for churches and other ministries with “boots on the ground” to help distribute the product. “Now the question is, how can we get ministries in places like Uganda and Rwanda to view this as a tool, because that’s the way we view it,” Mellace said. “How do we communicate that to churches and to different aid organizations? How do we reach out to those people? We all have contacts and relationships with different people, different ministries that would love to have this because they’re in the field and they could use it to start feeding the kids that they’re touching today anyway. “As it sits today, from all the commitments we’ve got, we can lower the price by more than 25 percent. We’re hoping to get it even lower. The lower we can get it the more lives we can help save. We’re really looking at it as an industry consortium, trying to get the cost of production down.

“We’re very excited about how God is using us,”Mellace added.“It’s been an incredible journey for me. We’re just finally seeing how God is causing us to use our business in the nut industry and our partners and it’s been exciting to see non-Christian businesses that are in the industry that just want to jump on board and help make a difference in the world.” Every six seconds a child dies from malnutrition. That means that in the roughly four minutes it took you to read this article, 40 children died. MikeMellace simply can’t stomach that. To view article in PDF format, click here.