Vitamin A stability during storage of fortified gari produced using different fortification strategies.

Food fortification is an effective strategy to combat vitamin A deficiency. Gari, a cassava-based West African food product, is an interesting product to fortify with vitamin A, but the low stability of vitamin A poses a challenge. We showed that toasted wheat bran can stabilise vitamin A as retinyl palmitate (RP) during storage of RP-fortified gari to a limited extent. After four weeks of accelerated storage, the RP retention of gari with toasted wheat bran was 34 ± 9% whereas this was only 19.4 ± 0.3% for gari without bran. When comparing different fortification strategies, including RP addition, red palm oil addition and the use of yellow cassava, red palm oil addition was shown the most promising strategy. After eight weeks of accelerated storage, the vitamin A retention was more than four times higher for red palm oil-fortified gari (22.6 ± 0.1%) than for the two other fortification strategies.