SITUATION/PROBLEM DESCRIPTION: 
Specificity of the sector and the market on which Danon operates makes the brand and its positive image one of the decisive factors in creating competitive advantage. The project Share Your Meal helps to achieve this goal.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION/SOLUTION:
The program's objective is to help in solving the problem of malnutrition of children in Poland:

• Financing a greater number of hot meals to the most needy children;
• Increasing social awareness of the scale of malnutrition of children in Poland;
• Inspiring actions which can help to limit the problem;

Danone defined three types of action which serve in realising the goals of the program:

• Direct involvement of consumers (in the framework of the socially involved marketing - CRM) - every year in September and October campaign the company prepares part of the products with the logo of the program Share Your Meal. By buying those products consumers help in feeding children. Every year Danone determines a number of hot meals that it plans to finance in one edition of the program.
• Raising social involvement through the participation in the Countrywide Collection of Food Share Your Meal - realised in cooperation with the Food Banks aims at increasing the volume of food. That in turn will increase the number of hot meals financed within the program.
• Raising civic awareness in local communities – program of small grants - Have You Got an Idea?- Share Your Meal – consists in supporting local activities.

Danone designates some financial subsidies to support projects limiting malnutrition among children and teenagers, assisting their comprehensive development and limiting their social exclusion. The main objective of the program is to combine the experience and potential of various partners: non-governmental organisations fighting against malnutrition, media and business whose joint activities can bring about a real social change in Poland. The program also enables involving employees in the voluntary actions. There is also a food collection campaign organized on the internal level of the company. An employee can take part in this project by adding previously purchased products to the common basket. During 2 years of its functioning, the program funded jointly approx. 1 million hot meals for children and conferred 16 grants of 5000 złoty each, which supported local initiatives in organising hot meals.

BENEFITS:

• Realising the company's strategy which will make the company a leader among the socially responsible companies in Poland;
• Creating a new brand on the market which generates positive associations (Share Your Meal);
• An increase of sales during the program;
• Creating an interesting program to trigger employees' involvement;

CHALLENGES:

• At the beginning of the program, the main challenge was to identify and elaborate the most needed and proper actions which would genuinely improve the situation of Polish children with malnutrition. To do that Danone and Polska Akcja Humanitarna organised two conferences devoted to this problem and ways of fighting it. Danon also financed the activities of the workgroup which brought significant support on the substantial and organizational levels;
• In further stages, it proved challenging to cooperate effectively with partners representing various environments, having different functioning specificity and different goals and interests. To have good cooperation with its partners, Danone decided to call a special team within the company which is in charge of the correct realisation of the program goals.

WORTH REMEMBERING:

• The key issue is partnership with ngo's thanks to which the company obtains reliable information about the problem it gets involved in;
• Both internal and external communication is one of the most important criterion of the program's success;
• You cannot build credibility of this type of programs not having this credibility in the eyes of your employees.