The Trump administration has reinstated a contract with a South Georgia manufacturer of a lifesaving nutritional supplement for children credited with saving millions of lives globally — just under a week after it canceled the contract amid dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And so, by midmorning six days after the cancellation, the production line at Mana Nutrition in the city of Fitzgerald was moving.
Jeremy Robinson’s hands were among the last to touch the packets of food in each box rolling by before they were sealed and shipped. A huge American flag hung from the roof behind them.
Robinson and Aliyah Hill were checking to make sure none of the packets were leaking.
“You want to make sure it’s sealed up real good,” Robinson said. “You don’t want no grease in the bottom.”
Robinson had good reason to not want any of what this factory makes to go to waste.
“We save lives over here, sir,” Robinson said. “And that’s a fact. We have the numbers.”
Mana Nutrition is a nonprofit organization with a factory and headquarters in Ben Hill County, population 17,000. It had a contract with USAID. That contract ended on Feb. 25 along with the gutting of USAID. That left pallet after pallet of food comprised mostly of peanuts grown in South Georgia stuck on the factory floor.
“So, this is mostly peanut butter; tons of sugar in it to give them energy,” said human resources manager Stephen Raney during a brief plant tour.
The peanut butter packets are for children so hungry, they literally can’t even sense hunger anymore.
“These babies, they don’t have the energy to cry at this point,” Raney said. “So they’re listless. They’re just there.”
Each of the boxes checked by Jeremy Robinson and Aliyah Hill contains 150 packets. That’s enough food for a starving child to eat three times a day for six weeks.
“And that brings them back from wasting,” Raney said.
So, one box saves a child. 4,000 boxes typically go out the loading dock each day, adding up to millions of children saved every year. Those are the numbers Jeremy Robinson keeps in mind while he’s working on the production line.
A map of the world in the factory lobby shows just where children have been saved. The company’s logo of a maternal figure holding a baby swaddled into the shape of a peanut is pinned to nations across the belt of sub-equatorial Africa, in Central America, in South and Southeast Asia, and, in the only example in the Northern hemisphere, in Ukraine. It turns out Mana packets were airlifted to Ukraine when Russia’s initial invasion broke off food supply lines.
Like Robinson, Raney, who says he grew up in a pastor’s home, sees real meaning in this work.
“I saw my parents all their lives serving others,” Raney said. “And maybe not to this extent. They weren’t, you know, saving starving children, but they were still helping people where they could. So I think that’s important, how we live our lives. But we get to do it every day at work.”
This is how Mana worked for years, under the auspices of USAID, whose logo and slogan “From the American People” was printed on Mana’s boxes.
That was until Mana CEO Mark Moore got an email from USAID.
“The headline was ‘Cancellation of Contracts’,” Moore said. “Within about three minutes, all of our future contracts were knocked out.”
The contract cancellations meant immediately changing out the USAID packaging for something any vendor could use. Plus, their Savannah warehouse was left packed with pallets branded with the logo of an agency that might not really exist.
“So I think we were all sort of shocked that we’ve been caught up in the bloodletting or maybe in the woodchipper,” Moore said.
Publicly, the Trump administration and Elon Musk had said food aid wasn’t supposed to be touched by Musk and the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE.
“But then we started pushing, reaching out to our congressional members,” Moore said. “And sending messages as best we could through to the administration asking, ‘Is this a mistake?’”
Mana tapped U.S. Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia’s 8th District, a stripe of Middle and South Georgia including Ben Hill County; and Rep. Buddy Carter in Goergia’s 1st, which includes Savannah, to try and break through to the president. Both Scott and Carter are Republicans.
“Mana is an incredible mission-driven organization, and I am thankful to the administration for reinstating their contracts,” Scott said in an emailed statement. “The administration is working to ensure that all U.S. foreign assistance aligns with our national security interests and global mission. Mana is committed to ending child malnutrition and is an organization our country should be proud of.”
At the same time, Moore found opportunities to tell the Mana story across all kinds of news outlets.
“We have, yes,” ,” Moore said of recently talking to news folks. “Not intentionally so. But for the first time the media has come to us.”
So days passed, stories aired, politicians talked. And then, another email.
“We got the news that they were back,” Mark Moore said, referring to Mana’s contracts.
The email was sent at 8 p.m. the Sunday following the cancellation. With no real explanation why, Mana’s USAID contracts were back on. The State Department has not yet responded to a GPB request for explanation.
Regardless, after the Monday lunch hour, USAID labels were set to come back.
Moore is, of course, relieved. He said being able to save kids from starving again is more than a moral victory.
“I’ve traveled to Sudan, to South Sudan, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Chad this past year, to Ethiopia,” he said. “I’ve been in these feeding programs all over the world. And when you get to the last mile, to the end of the last road, where people are the most desperate, you don’t find a packet that says ‘A Gift of the Russian People’ or ‘A Gift of the Chinese people.’ But you do find packets of food that says ‘A Gift of the American people.
“For the pennies that it costs us, it’s an amazing, message and an amazing impact and very much an America First message.”
But Moore cautions that just because the contracts are back doesn’t mean the supply chain for Mana’s emergency food is up and running. USAID as an agency is still gutted. In war-torn or even ungoverned countries, who will take Mana’s food across that last mile?
“Yeah, well, we don’t know,” Moore said.
Moore says that is his biggest worry now.
