Encouraging food enterprises to be part of value chains

At the Vietnam International Conference on Food Industry 2017 with the theme “Improving the Vietnamese food value chain” on November 16^th 2017, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Do Thang Hai stressed that the Ministry of Industry and Trade along with ministries and departments always encouraged and supported food enterprises to invest and develop along the value chain in order to ensure food safety, develop brands and expand markets.

 Alexandre Bouchot, the Agricultural Affairs Counselor of the French Embassy to Vietnam said that Vietnamese products had advantages to access to the large EU market, especially when the Vietnam – EU Free Trade Agreement took effects. However, in order to join this market extensively, it was critical to develop products along value chains to track the origins, ensure the quality standards and food safety, as well as enhance product values.

Survey of Nielsen Vietnam revealed that 63% of consumers were willing to pay for premium products because of their high quality and safety standards. 53% of the survey participants said that they would pay more for premium products containing environment-friendly materials.

Vo Thanh Do, Deputy Head of Department of Agro-product Processing and Market Development (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development) said that Vietnam had advantages of material resource abundant to meet the raw material demand of large-scaled processing food enterprises. In fact, more and more domestic and foreign enterprises invested in processing food in Vietnam. In particular, domestic enterprises such as Satra, Vinmart, Saigon Co.op, PAN Group, etc. or foreign major corporations such as CJ, Aeon, etc. linked with Vietnamese enterprises to develop processing food value chain for a wide range of products such as packaged food, frozen food, processing seafood, etc.

In order to support enterprises to enhance their brand values, Ta Hoang Linh, Deputy Head of Department of Trade Promotion (Ministry of Industry and Trade) said that the Department always updated information for enterprises; consulted them to design products that met market demand; trained enterprises skills of negotiation and contracting with foreign partners. The Department was developing advertisement and trade promotion strategies for national branded products of enterprises.