You would have to target your population, certainly, but I can personally vouch that:
There are many many sanitary reasons to avoid eating in most eating establishments in the developing world. If you make it a goal to make MacChippies more sanitary than the average competition, this will not be a significant barrier.
McD’s is already present in the large cities on many developing countries. For this idea to be effective, it should target smaller towns. There is probably a pretty good market for snack foods, although in many places it will be a street-vendor based franchise. My experience has been limited to Africa, but from what I’ve seen the majority of street foods are either bready (taste good longer when out of the oil than do potatoes) or sweets, so there may be a significant market for salty, as long as you don’t mind cutting into the already existent markets.
In Africa, it will probably be easier to to use the sweet potato and manioc, in Asia you might switch over to green plantain or banana (if you get them before they turn even a tiny bit yellow and soft, they taste like potatoes—kind of). There will be a diverse number of other fryable plants depending on your locale. But there would be no strong need to start a new crop.
While this is highly dependent on locale, generally speaking developing countries have a high level of physical labor, and the additional calories of a serving of fried food is not going to be a major issue. If you want to avoid setting up those sort of franchise in towns where most workers are sedentary factory workers, that would be a reasonable adjustment.
It is not too uncommon for iodized salt to be ‘mandated’, but non-iodized salt to be easy available cheaply. It is generally not considered necessary to iodize salt for perserving meats, for example, which is sold cheaply in large bags, then re-packaged and resold in small bags ‘unofficially’. Regardless, the WHO states “Iodine deficiency is one of the main cause of impaired cognitive development in children” and “54 countries are still iodine-deficient.” Questioning the need is fine, but do some reading..
Trying to give worldwide rules for developing nations is unwise. If you want to argue for more fine-grained application, fine. But “there is a worldwide epidemic of cardiovascular disease” is fairly useless here. We care specifically if there is an epidemic of cardiovascular disease in South Africa, Paraguay, and Russia. And if there are, don’t do this plan there. Easy.
Having said all of that, the most effective solution is probably not a for-profit one, because if deep-frying starchy plants was a good way to make money off of very poor people, someone local would already be doing it. There are plenty of street vendors deep-frying stuff, and they have much less overhead than you will. So as long as we are losing money anyway, we are probably better off identify organizations that can distribute the salt to street vendors and restaurateurs (or better yet schools, if the government is not doing that already) in rural areas, and have them do so at a low cost. I can vouch for the existence of these organizations in Africa, SA, and Asia. Northern Russia might be more difficult.
You would have to target your population, certainly, but I can personally vouch that:
There are many many sanitary reasons to avoid eating in most eating establishments in the developing world. If you make it a goal to make MacChippies more sanitary than the average competition, this will not be a significant barrier.
McD’s is already present in the large cities on many developing countries. For this idea to be effective, it should target smaller towns. There is probably a pretty good market for snack foods, although in many places it will be a street-vendor based franchise. My experience has been limited to Africa, but from what I’ve seen the majority of street foods are either bready (taste good longer when out of the oil than do potatoes) or sweets, so there may be a significant market for salty, as long as you don’t mind cutting into the already existent markets.
In Africa, it will probably be easier to to use the sweet potato and manioc, in Asia you might switch over to green plantain or banana (if you get them before they turn even a tiny bit yellow and soft, they taste like potatoes—kind of). There will be a diverse number of other fryable plants depending on your locale. But there would be no strong need to start a new crop.
While this is highly dependent on locale, generally speaking developing countries have a high level of physical labor, and the additional calories of a serving of fried food is not going to be a major issue. If you want to avoid setting up those sort of franchise in towns where most workers are sedentary factory workers, that would be a reasonable adjustment.
It is not too uncommon for iodized salt to be ‘mandated’, but non-iodized salt to be easy available cheaply. It is generally not considered necessary to iodize salt for perserving meats, for example, which is sold cheaply in large bags, then re-packaged and resold in small bags ‘unofficially’. Regardless, the WHO states “Iodine deficiency is one of the main cause of impaired cognitive development in children” and “54 countries are still iodine-deficient.” Questioning the need is fine, but do some reading..
Trying to give worldwide rules for developing nations is unwise. If you want to argue for more fine-grained application, fine. But “there is a worldwide epidemic of cardiovascular disease” is fairly useless here. We care specifically if there is an epidemic of cardiovascular disease in South Africa, Paraguay, and Russia. And if there are, don’t do this plan there. Easy.
Having said all of that, the most effective solution is probably not a for-profit one, because if deep-frying starchy plants was a good way to make money off of very poor people, someone local would already be doing it. There are plenty of street vendors deep-frying stuff, and they have much less overhead than you will. So as long as we are losing money anyway, we are probably better off identify organizations that can distribute the salt to street vendors and restaurateurs (or better yet schools, if the government is not doing that already) in rural areas, and have them do so at a low cost. I can vouch for the existence of these organizations in Africa, SA, and Asia. Northern Russia might be more difficult.
[Edited for typos.]