Sarr Kyi!
Creating the environment for healthier choices through snacking.
With snack shops and vendors on almost every street of Shwe Pyi Thar, finding food is never an issue. But young migrant workers often look for the quickest, cheapest fix in short breaks. They tend to go for processed snacks when the readily available, affordable, nutritious choices are around the corner.
Sarr Kyi, is a 360 social mobilisation campaign funded by LIFT, came from a partnership between two local CSOs, Save the Children and Bridge. Its goal was to promote healthier snacking habits for women, with a focus on young individuals, especially women employed in factories, while also aiming for a broader impact across various age groups.
With
Save the Children
Objective
Improve demand for and access to safe, affordable, nutritious foods among migrant factory workers in peri-urban Yangon
Demographic
Mostly-migrant women 16-40 living in peri-urban Yangon, and their families and friends
Types of work
Research & Evaluation, Strategy, Behaviour Change, Branding, Storytelling, Design, Illustration, Social Media, Service design
Themes
Health & Nutrition, WASH, Gender Equality, Safe Migration, Decent Work
Challenge
Tasked with promoting healthier snack alternatives for women working in the industrial zone — who often used snacking as a meal substitute — we knew we had to put their considerations at the centre of our campaign.
When we spoke with them during the rapid assessment research, all of them selected snacks for practical reasons, such as being readily available, affordable, and how it affected their ability to work.
Both our target audience and their children tend to view pre-packaged foods and soft drinks as desirable treats, and their perception of the snacking experience leans toward immediate gratification (taste, energy, and enjoyment), while the health benefits take a back seat.
Our approach? Make “choosing healthy” practical, simple, and as fun as a soft drink.
Approach
Interventions often try to encourage nutritional diversity using food groups—collection of foods that share similar nutritional properties or biological classifications. We had already learned that this is not how choices were being made here.
Our approach? Make “choosing healthy” tap into the same drivers that were informing past decisions. And to highlight healthy foods that were readily available to them.
Collaborating with a nutritionist, we identified local snacks readily available at vendors, and anchored them to specific benefits relevant to our target group’s preferences: energy, productivity and alertness for a factory work day, a stronger immune system, and even beauty.
Branding
The brand name Sarr Kyi means “Try it!” to grab attention, make memorable, and encourage a small switch. We created five nutrition indicators that focus on benefits which will help our target audience to choose healthier snacks easily.
An explainer film introduced our ‘more-approachable-approach’ to the benefits of healthy finger food.
We rolled out this simplified nutrition messaging to the neighbourhood vendors with clearly marked menu items.
We made sure the healthy options stand out - with promotional photos of healthy snacks, while less healthy ones were ‘nudged’ down the menu.
How to make existing, often-traditional snacks more appealing?
Creative and fun tactics to create engagement, such as food stickers that highlight the benefits of healthy snacks along with playful messages given to customers whenever they purchase a healthy snack
And we rewarded healthy habits using pre-stamped loyalty cards that were given out and stamped for each more healthy purchase.
A few other things got designed and printed to support messaging and the team on the ground…
Digital
Sarr Kyi Viber is the primary digital promotional channel to highlight vendors and nutrition messages among a target audience who have limited access to the internet.
On Facebook, we promoted the same messages and about the campaign activities to a more general audience.
To engage with the audience, a series of fun traditional snacks recipe videos were created.
"I've had the chance to understand the nutritional value of the snacks I often have, such as Mohinga (traditional rice vermicelli with fish soup). It has been a delightful learning journey for me."
-Garment factory worker, 27
Results
70+
Vendors joined in
74k+
Healthy snacks sold
99%
Participating vendors said Sarr Kyi increased their sales
1.76m+
People reached on social
121k+
Social engagement
7.5k+
New users on the page
Legacy
“Before the campaign, it was observed that many vendors were not fully aware of the nutritional benefits of the food they were selling. With the campaign activities, they gained essential nutrition knowledge they could subsequently share within the community.”
-Save the Children
