Nutritional evaluation of traditional millet-based food products for rural diet diversification

Abstract:

Consider a grain that has fed rural Ugandan households for generations yet rarely appears on nutrition programme menus, largely because it comes packaged as a coarse flour that many younger consumers find unappealing. This research evaluated five millet-based food products, plain millet flour, millet flakes, a millet biscuit, millet vermicelli, and a fortified millet porridge mix, for proximate composition, mineral content, and consumer sensory acceptability, with the goal of identifying value-added formats that could support dietary diversification in rural communities without requiring consumers to change their grain source. The fortified porridge mix recorded the highest protein content at 12.4% and the highest overall sensory acceptability score at 7.6 on a nine-point hedonic scale, while the millet biscuit recorded the lowest crude fiber content at 8.6%, reflecting the refining involved in biscuit-grade flour production. Iron and calcium content varied more by processing method than by product category alone, with roasted and malted products retaining more mineral content than products subjected to higher-temperature extrusion processing. Comparing traditional millet flour against the four value-added products showed every value-added product matching or exceeding traditional flour on protein content, while sensory scores for the value-added products consistently exceeded scores recorded for traditional flour porridge in parallel taste panels. These findings support value-added millet product development, particularly fortified porridge mixes and biscuits, as a practical route to improving both the nutritional contribution and consumer acceptability of millet within rural diets.