School Milk Scheme
Educate the next generation of European children
The European School Milk Scheme aims at ensuring access to healthy and nutritious dairy products for European children. This program offers subsidies to schools for procuring milk products from local farmers, alongside educational programs promoting the importance of consuming dairy. The EU Commission has set itself to revise the scheme in line with the Farm to Fork strategy’s focus on sustainability.
The EU school scheme plays a key role in educating younger generations on the importance of a healthy and balanced diet, and hence encourages the consumption of highly nutritious foods such as milk and dairy. Dairy products provide a multitude of essential vitamins and minerals that are of vital significance for health throughout the life cycle, but expressly during the growth and developmental phase that occurs during childhood and puberty. Dietary consumption data demonstrates that milk in children is steadily declining.
Dairy is good for the:
Brain
Bones
Teeth
Muscles
Nervous system
Several EU Member States e.g., France, Belgium, Ireland, and Spain recommend around 3-4 servings of dairy products per day for children.
Others, including Denmark, Finland and The Netherlands recommend the consumption of around 500-600 mL of dairy foods per day for children
“Milk and dairy products play a key role in healthy human nutrition and development throughout life, but especially in childhood”
(FAO, 2013)
The scheme should educate the next EU generation on healthy and nutritious diets and address any shortcomings in the implementation of the scheme across Member States.
The European Dairy Association (EDA) is closely monitoring developments to ensure that the revised School Milk Scheme operates efficiently and meets the daily dairy recommendations in all Member States.