A nonprofit with roots in Matthews, North Carolina, is running a Georgia factory capable of feeding 10 million malnourished children a year — and MANA also produces ready-to-use supplementary food, or RUSF. MANA Nutrition produces ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF, a peanut-based paste that requires no cooking, water or refrigeration and lets children with severe acute malnutrition recover at home instead of in a hospital.
The organization, described by The Business Journals as a Matthews-based nonprofit with about eight employees at its North Carolina offices, runs its manufacturing operation out of Fitzgerald, Georgia, roughly four hours south of Atlanta. According to Georgia Public Broadcasting, that Ben Hill County factory and headquarters is a 135,000-square-foot operation, per MANA Nutrition, that can push out 500,000 pounds of product daily — enough to fill four shipping containers of RUTF a day. MANA also operates a 320,000-square-foot facility in Savannah and employs roughly 190 people at the Fitzgerald plant, per The Business Journals.
MANA co-founder and CEO Mark Moore started the nonprofit in 2009 after a decade living in Uganda as a missionary, where he learned Lusoga, a language related to Swahili, The Business Journals reports. Moore had previously worked as a legislative fellow and Africa subject-matter expert on Senator Mary Landrieu's staff, and he says Anderson Cooper's reporting on child hunger helped inspire him to found MANA — a connection that came full circle in 2025, when Cooper named Moore a CNN Champion for Change for his work combating severe childhood malnutrition, according to the same report.
From $60 a Box to a Lifesaving Supply Chain
MANA was the first U.S. producer of RUTF, created under the Food for Peace Act, which authorizes the government to use domestic agricultural surpluses for humanitarian relief, per The Business Journals. The therapeutic food itself traces back to 1996, when French doctor Andre Briend and Mark Manary, working with Doctors Without Borders, invented the formula, the outlet reports — a peanut-based paste stabilized enough to carry a two-year shelf life without refrigeration.
Georgia Public Broadcasting reports that roughly 4,000 boxes typically leave MANA's loading dock each day, and that each small pouch packs 500 calories, a figure also noted by CNN. MANA says on its own website that the global cost of a case of RUTF has fallen from $56 in 2010 to $40 in 2024 — a decline mirrored in The Business Journals' reporting that a box cost $60 when MANA started and roughly $40 at the time of its reporting, with Moore saying the food's real value tops $80 per box.
USAID Fallout and a Scramble for New Contracts
MANA competes for its funding through competitive government bids and has drawn contracts from federal sources as well as World Vision, Feed the Children and the United Nations, per The Business Journals. But the nonprofit remains heavily exposed to federal dollars; CEO Mark Moore told The Current that about 95% of MANA's funding comes from government contracts. MANA is a U.S. manufacturer of RUTF.
The dismantling of USAID hit hard. MANA has said USAID is gone and that some of its contracts were canceled, leaving it with a different set of U.S. government contacts than before, The Business Journals reports. The outlet says MANA had $50 million in contracts that officials told Moore they would not take up, forcing the nonprofit to wait five months through a cash crunch. MANA kept producing RUTF anyway, increasing its debt in the process, while a UK hedge fund supplied working capital to keep operations running without seeking repayment, according to the same reporting. Bank of America also provides MANA with a line of credit it relies on for operations, per The Business Journals.
The disruption briefly left the nonprofit sitting on massive unsold inventory — Finance Yahoo reported roughly 600,000 cases of RUTF piled up in MANA's Georgia warehouse at one point, though that figure has since dropped to about one-sixth of its peak as shipments resumed, the outlet notes. Georgia Public Broadcasting separately reports that MANA and fellow manufacturer Edesia Nutrition are now hunting for new delivery channels after USAID's exit upended the international RUTF pipeline. MANA has an expansion planned that is intended to increase production three-fold.
A Peanut Butter Side Business With a Mission
To diversify and build resilience, MANA has shifted roughly 5% of its work toward a domestic brand called Good Spread peanut butter, a move CEO Moore described to The Current as a hedge against future disruptions. For every jar sold, MANA produces a packet of RUTF and uses additional proceeds to subsidize costs for U.S. food banks, per the same report; The Current notes Good Spread has already delivered more than 2 million pounds of peanut butter to food banks nationwide at a subsidized price. MANA is partnering with Feeding America on the Good Spread initiative, according to The Business Journals.
The stakes behind all of it are stark. Severe acute malnutrition is the leading killer of children under six, per The Business Journals. Moore also told the outlet that in longitudinal studies tracking children after treatment, most never returned for more RUTF and went on to have a good life — a sign, he suggests, that the six-week intervention works. Those numbers carry global weight: UNICEF projected that at least 14 million children would face disruptions to nutrition services in 2025 because of funding cuts, with more than 2.4 million severely malnourished children at risk of going without RUTF altogether.
Moore met with global funders during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City in September, The Business Journals notes. MANA continues to use about 2 million pounds of Georgia-grown peanuts to manufacture its therapeutic food, distributing RUTF to partners working in communities hit by famine, war and climate crisis. For Moore, the ultimate goal is for the need to disappear entirely — he has said he hopes MANA will eventually no longer be necessary.
