By Bert Jan Post, Managing Director, Tetra Pak (Thailand) Limited.
On September 29, we celebrated World School Milk Day. This is a great occasion to remind ourselves of the importance of school feeding programmes (SFPs), and to discuss how these programmes help to tackle the challenges of malnutrition and food insecurity at a global level, while making a measurable difference to children’s lives.
Currently, some 821 million people on Earth are chronically undernourished. With the global population expected to rise to more than 9.7 billion by 2050, feeding the world represents significant future challenges in the form of hunger and inefficient agriculture. But there are already existing challenges related to malnutrition and education. School feeding programmes play a very important role in addressing not only the challenges of child malnutrition, but also of school attendance and food insecurity, often providing the first meal of the day for children. These programmes are a proven means of improving health and promoting better educational outcomes. More than 368 million children in 169 countries receive food in their schools, mostly through government budgets. Milk is served in 62 countries and reaches 160 million children, either as a part of a school feeding programme or as a separate school milk programme.
The first school milk programme was created back in 1929 in Mexico, and it continues to be one of the longest running feeding programmes in the world today. As the programme grew in coverage throughout the country, safe distribution of milk was challenged by various logistical and infrastructure factors, especially in remote areas where a viable cold chain did not exist. As a practical solution to overcome these distribution and food safety challenges, Tetra Classic® Aseptic 250ml packages were introduced in 1962, marking the first school milk programme where Tetra Pak packages were used.
The solution proved to be so effective that today more than 68 million children in 56 countries now receive milk or other fortified beverages in Tetra Pak packages in their schools. Through our global experiences, we have seen how effective sustainable school feeding programmes can be in improving nutrition and education for vulnerable groups. Research studies demonstrated the positive impact of fortified milk consumed by children. During a 12-month period, the presence of anaemia decreased by 21.6%, while iron deficiency decreased by 3.2%. Median iron and zinc intake also increased by 0.96mg and 0.3mg per day, respectively.
Thailand has its own success story of the school milk programme, which was first introduced here in 1992. Tetra Pak is actively involved in the programme, and we are proud to do our part by using food processing and packaging technologies to provide safe and nutritious milk for Thai children throughout the year. Even during the pandemic lockdown when schools were closed, the school milk programme continued, with parents picking up UHT milk from schools to deliver to their children at home.
But there is more to our programme – we want our initiatives to support the development of sustainable food value chains and reduce food losses and food waste. To promote environmental education for the long-term, Tetra Pak Thailand teamed with Dairy Farming Promotion Organization of Thailand, local government, and industry partners launched the School Milk Carton Recycling project. This initiative promotes the collection of used beverage cartons, and also provides information about the value of recycling and explains how to handle packages before recycling. The project aims to encourage the collection of discarded UHT milk cartons from the school milk programme in Bangkok and recycles them into furniture, roof sheets, and other useful products.
Tetra Pak continues to play a significant role in School Feeding Programmes worldwide, and we regularly share global best practices and provide technical assistance in the evaluation and implementation of school feeding programmes, food safety and quality controls, product development, distribution, and environmental education activities in schools. One of the recent success stories comes from Sri Lanka. According to the World Food Programme, Sri Lanka has levels of acute malnutrition – ranging between 14 and 35 percent in the districts surveyed. Malnutrition is considered to be an obstacle for socio-economic development in the country, which has a growing population of 21 million.
To address these challenges, the government of Sri Lanka launched a school milk programme in 2019. The new programme initially covers 400,000 children across 950 schools, and is using 100 percent locally produced UHT milk. It is fully funded by the government and implemented by the Ministry of Education. Our customer, Cargills Ceylon, started supplying milk in Tetra Fino® Aseptic 150ml packages to 185,000 school children in 400 schools out of the total.
Tetra Pak supported the initiative by providing technical assistance based on best practice from school feeding programmes across the world. As part of our support, essential training was provided on proper food safety protocols, environmental education and recycling. And similarly to our initiative in Thailand, Tetra Pak has also identified and engaged a local partner in Sri Lanka to collect and recycle the used cartons from the schools.
