HÀ NỘI — The Association of Food Transparency (AFT) has recently unveiled AFT Connect, an online information portal designed to support and link Việt Nam's clean food community.

The launch marked an important first step toward building digital infrastructure for transparent food production and trade in Việt Nam, where food safety scandals and concerns over contaminated food have become a major public issue.

AFT Connect was introduced as part of the DEP-ECO (Developing Eco-Market Ecosystem) project, initiated and carried out by the AFT, with funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the International Trade Centre (ITC), under the supervision of the Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency within the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The project seeks to foster a transparent market ecosytem that empowers Vietnamese food enterprises to achieve sustainable growth and deeper integration into the global supply chain.

The platform is expected to serve as shared digital backbone enabling stakeholders in the clean food sector to gradually digitise, standardise, and publicly disclose information, ultimately aiding the fight against unsafe products and protecting consumer interests.

Far from a conventional static database, AFT Connect is engineered as an open, producer-and enterprise-centric ecosystem. Participants can incrementally develop a "transparency footprint" for their products and operations, incorporating digitised capability profiles, B2B digital storefronts, uniform traceability protocols, and broad connectivity across the network.

AFT Chairwoman Nguyễn Thị Hồng Minh noted that roughly 98 per cent of Vietnamese food enterprises are small and medium-sized. AFT Connect is designed as a unified platform where clean food producers can unite, collaborate, and build collective strength.

As the community becomes stronger, it paves the way to restore societal and market confidence, she added. — VNA/VNS