Food safety is always the leading concern of consumers. Photo bepgiadinh.com

HA NOI (Biz Hub) — A seminar on safe food production and the role it can play in making food trademarks more commercially viable was held yesterday in Ha Noi.

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade (MoIT) Ho Thi Kim Thoa acknowledged the food sector's two decades of success in manufacturing a wide variety of highly competitive products meeting both domestic and export demands.

The sector now contributes nearly 20 per cent of the country's GDP.

According to Deputy Head of MoIT's Viet Nam Competitive Authority (VCA) Nguyen Phuong Nam, the food sector has also attracted impressive foreign investment in recent years and hundreds of food processing factories meeting international standards have opened across the country.

However, due to the high competitiveness in this sector, many enterprises engage in unhealthy actions to cut costs – compromising food safety.

Nguyen Van Viet, chairman of the Viet Nam Beer-Alcohol-Beverage Association (VBA), said that food safety is always the leading concern of consumers, so it plays a key role in the success of any food trademark.

To help the industry shore up sustainable development domestically and expand into global markets, MoIT is supporting businesses in promoting, registering, and protecting their trademarks, training human resources, updating themselves on the latest economic, environmental and legal information and applying cutting-edge technological advancements.

The seminar was co-organized by Cong Thuong Newspaper and the Ministry of Industry and Trade's Department of Light Industry and Department of Science and Technology. — VNS