Sweets that clear your sore throat

ROMA – WHEN you have a sore throat, maybe due to common cold, you allow these candies to melt in your mouth.

They are not just sweet, they are also soothing.

“That’s because we’ve got measured amounts of wild mint, honey and lemon in there,” said Joalane Mohale who produces these sweets at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) Innovation Hub.

With these sweets, you clear your sore throat, fever and a cough.

The story starts in 2019 — in fact it starts earlier than that.

“That’s when my teammates and I were busy making and selling packaged teas out of various medicinal plants,” Mohale said.

Business was good.

People just loved their teas.

It is not surprising because the tea itself came in all kinds of versions.

The ingredients ranged from corn silk, to olives and mint, from Artemisia (lengana), to eucalyptus (boleikomo) and numerous other plants.

So people would come from all walks of life to tell them how the catalogue of teas they took to the markets was helping them.

One would say they assist with a headache, another would cite period pains, another would mention fever, flu, sore throats, all kinds of ailments.

It was something worth celebrating, with one exception.

These people were almost always adults.

There were simply no youths and children in the audience.

It dawned on Mohale that perhaps their products were not reaching the broader market.

What would they do?

“When we sat down and thought hard about it, we came to a conclusion that the way we delivered these soothing plants were simply not in the interest of the young.”

You hardly ever see young people sitting down and enjoying a cup of tea.

But we all know that they delight in munching sweets of all kinds.

So what if they used the same stuff they were putting in tea in the sweets?

It could be a brilliant idea.

So she started.

That was back in 2019.

The making of sweets might sound easy.

After all sweets are sweets, isn’t it?

She would soon learn what other seasoned manufacturers of anything have learned before her.

That manufacturing, no matter what it is you are manufacturing, is hard.

One experienced manufacturer likes to say “what people don’t seem to understand is that manufacturing is not so much about the product as it is about the process of making that product”.

The process, that’s the hard part.

But she tried it any way.

“I kept failing until I decided it was time to consult someone who was already in the business.”

The person consulted was ready to assist.

She opened up about what sweets really were.

She talked about different kinds of sweets and how each kind differed from another.

She told her that only certain kinds of sweets would be suitable for the kind of stuff she wanted to do.

She got back encouraged to try.

“You won’t believe it,” she said.

“Even with all that information, it would take another four months for me to be able to nail the sweets to my satisfaction.”

In the beginning, the sweets just collapsed a few days after being put together.

When she fixed that, then came another problem.

The sweets just went bad every two weeks or so.

She kept her experiments alive until she was able to solve the problems.

“One of the things I realised was the importance of accuracy,” she said.

“You have to be extremely accurate with measurements.”

You get a small thing wrong, the whole system collapses.

Among the ingredients in the sweets is a wild mint.

Basotho are known to have depended on wild mint to fight cold since time immemorial.

“Many would put it in their nostrils in times of flu or other stuff and it was celebrated for its effectiveness.”

Scientists have noted that mints can soothe upset stomach and ease colds, flu, fever, headaches, and sinus congestion.

Another candidate is honey—that magic food.

A CNN report says “researchers said honey was (found to be) more effective in relieving the symptoms of cold and flu-like illnesses than the usual commercial remedies”.

As if that was not enough already, she added lemon.

Listen to what some scientists have to say about lemon: “Lemons are rich in vitamin C and flavonoids that work together against flu and cold infections”.

Well, with the three in one, you are ready to munch your way out of most annoying flus and colds.

Good luck!

Own Correspondent