Over the past two decades, increasing efforts have been made to find suitable nutritional products for managing particularly moderate forms of malnutrition following acute phase treatment, including the adoption of ready-to-use therapeutic foods. The challenge in meeting nutrient needs of normal growing young children and other vulnerable population groups with scant food supply has led us to explore the use of local, traditional and culturally adaptable food-based complementary foods employing the food multimix (FMM) concept. The present paper examined FMM as a concept to demonstrate how locally available composite complementary recipes were used to create highly nutritious recipes at low cost and improve nutrition among vulnerable individuals. The method employed a food-to-food fortification approach for recipe development making use of the ‘nutrient strengths’ of candidate ingredients. A range of different food recipes had been developed using a stepwise approach and combinations of foods from different populations and communities and packaged as 100 g recipe powders. Proximate and micronutrient analyses have been undertaken, optimised and the nutrient compositions compared with reference nutrient intakes for target groups. Examples of recipes and their nutrient profiles had been highlighted for different formulations showing different ingredients. Theoretical nutrient values were translated into practice based on data from intervention studies. The FMM approach using locally available food has held promise, and published evidence did indicate that the concept can contribute significantly to long-term food-based solutions to meeting nutrient needs of vulnerable groups in poor communities.

Recent re-evaluations of dietary reference values (DRV) for vitamin D have established intake requirements between 10 and 20 µg/d. National nutrition surveys indicate that habitual mean intakes of vitamin D in the population are typically in the range 3–7 µg/d. As vitamin D supplementation will not be effective at a population level because the uptake is generally low, creative food-based solutions are needed to bridge the gap between current intakes and these new requirement values. The overarching aim of this review is to highlight how food-based solutions can have an important role in bridging this gap and counteracting vitamin D inadequacy in Europe and elsewhere. The present review initially briefly overviews very recent new European DRV for vitamin D and, while not in agreement on requirement estimates, how they point very clearly to the need for food-based solutions. The review discusses the need for traditional fortification of foods in the dairy and other sectors, and finally overviews recent advances in the area of biofortification of food with vitamin D. In conclusion, increasing vitamin D intakes across the population distribution is important from a public health perspective to reduce the high degree of inadequacy of vitamin D intake in Europe. Fortification, including biofortification, of a wider range of foods, which accommodate diversity, is likely to have the potential to increase vitamin D intakes across the population distribution. Research has had, and will continue to have, a key role in terms of developing food-based solutions and tackling vitamin D deficiency.