Bezos family’s $137m gift helps R.I. nonprofit feed malnourished children

PROVIDENCE — The Bezos family is giving up to $137 million to Edesia Nutrition, allowing the North Kingstown-based nonprofit to double its production and provide more nutrient-packed food for malnourished children worldwide.

The family of Jacklyn and Miguel “Mike” Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is providing $127 million, plus a $10 million matching fund, to the social enterprise.

“More healthy and well-nourished kids mean a bright future for all of us,” Mike Bezos said,

“and this investment in Edesia will allow them to reach even more children with this life-saving intervention.”

The funding will allow Edesia to feed 10 million children per year — doubling the 5 million it’s on pace to feed in 2023, Edesia founder and CEO Navyn Salem said.

“Ending malnutrition isn’t just a slogan. It’s our plan,” Salem said. “There are many problems in the world that we don’t know how to solve. Malnutrition is not one of them. We know what we need to do: Get life-saving food to children who are acutely malnourished or are at risk of becoming so.”

Edesia, a nonprofit social enterprise named after the Roman goddess of food, partners with humanitarian aid groups such as USAID, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme, and it has fed 22 million malnourished children since it was formed in 2010.

Edesia plans to use the new funding to expand its North Kingstown facility to include more storage capacity, rail access, and production lines, and it will add at least 50 new jobs to the 150 it has now.

“We are building an entire factory floor dedicated to the prevention of malnutrition,” said Salem. “It’s a totally different protocol, product, and way of distributing that will reach children much, much sooner and prevent them from needing to be in the hospital or from ever becoming severely malnourished.”