The Healthy Food Healthy Living (HFHL) team used Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to campaign healthy food.
As well as giving out chocolates made from local ingredients, they also distributed fliers, stickers and other campaign material. The campaign took place over two days (13 and 14 February 2013) in several locations, including Udayana University in Denpasar, the traffic lights on Jalan PB Sudirman in Denpasar, and schools in the Jalan Kamboja area of Denpasar. The main target of this campaign was young people, such as school pupils and students.
HFHL is a VECO Indonesia program run in partnership with Zuiddag Foundation in Belgium. Through this program, VECO Indonesia aims to introduce healthy food to young people, particularly in Denpasar and Solo. The campaign volunteers are young people too. So, HFHL is a healthy food campaign by young people for young people.
The HFHL campaigns vary, but basically they use unique and different communication media. The healthy food campaign on Valentine’s Day was one of these.
“Through the theme of Healthy Happy Valentine, we wanted to show young people that chocolate is healthy food,” said HFHL team member Ni Putu Estalita.
Esta explained that on Valentine’s Day, young people usually give chocolate to their partners. But not everyone knows what that chocolate contains. So, the HFHL team included an information leaflet about the nutritional content of chocolate.
Esta and the other volunteers also explained to the campaign target audience about the need to consume healthy food to support local farmers.
The chocolate that they distributed was made from local ingredients, from Sulawesi. There, VECO Indonesia supports cocoa farming in two program locations: Polewali Mandar in West Sulawesi, and Luwu Utara in South Sulawesi. VECO Indonesia supports local farmer organisations to improve the production and quality of their cocoa, and to link up with private companies.
Bernadetta Sutrisnowati, HFHL Coordinator for Bali, said that this initiative was also supported by Mars, a cocoa processing firm. Mars has been working with VECO Indonesia to support cocoa farmers in Sulawesi.
“So, the Healthy Happy Valentine initiative campaigned not only healthy food, but also the need to support local farmers,” said Wati.