On Jan 15th, Hai Phong Education and Training Department, National Institute of Nutrition and Ajinomoto Vietnam organized a conference to introduce the “Menu Book” belong to “School meal project” for Primary Boarding Schools in Hai Phong city with the attendance of more than 350 representatives from districts/provinces’s education department and leaders of nearly 100 boarding primary schools.

Childen is the future of country. Their physical and mental development is the most valuable scale that reflects the country’s social economic, potential development. Therefore, as a contribution to improve school nutrition status and enhance the pupil ‘stature and heath through primary shool meal, “School meal project” with 2 main objectives are “Standardizing menus and providing nutrition balance menus with good taste” and “Providing useful material and nutrition knowledge to primary schools, to share basic nutritrion knowledge to pupils through “3 minutes to change awareness” program.

After 3 years deploying at HCMC and Da Nang city, “School meal projects” continues to duplicate in Hai Phong city with the cooperation between 3 organizations: National Institute of Nutrition, Hai Phong Education and Training Department and Ajinomoto Vietnam. One year after initiation in Hai Phong city, with the advantage of menu development,  Ajinomoto Vietnam in cooperation with other revelant parties has developed 40 lunch menus for boarding primary schools.

For the first-step success of the project, the long-term vision of Hai Phong Education & Training Department is noticeable from the very first start of the project, as well as their deep care during the project deployment. Not only giving one-way instruction, the Department also organized many meetings, workshops for relevant officers to collect comments and ideas, realize difficulties and give solutions. Besides, the Project has received useful academic consultancy from National Institute of Nutrition, an organization that has actively contributed to the nutrition field in Vietnam.

It can be concluded that the School Meal Project is a unique example of social responsibilities – sharing in Vietnam. In which, governmental organizations can utilize not only the expense but also the corporate advantages including manpower, intelligence to serve the society and community. It is supposed that the society should acknowledge such contribution from companies to encourage them to contribute more for the community, so that meaningful projects like the School Meal Project will be duplicated in the future.