In recent years, an imbalance in children’s diets in countries such as Japan has seen a new type of malnutrition emerge, a problem which health authorities warn must be addressed quickly to prevent it becoming a more serious challenge for advanced societies. These days, children have less opportunity to learn healthy eating habits because usually, both parents are working and so families spend less time together during mealtimes. Latchkey children tend to skip meals and avoid fruits and vegetables, and instead, snack more.

In keeping with Otsuka Pharmaceutical’s corporate philosophy "Creating new products for better health worldwide", the campaign’s objectives were to improve nutrition education for children in a fun, creative and delicious way. Moreover, the project was structured in such a way that even after the campaign ended, children could continue the learning themselves, even without parental supervision.

The strategy took as its starting point the reality that nutrition education has been taught to young children in schools and by their parents at home, but the process has not been interactive, nor is the experience fun for children. The lack of engagement in the teaching to date has meant children haven’t changed their dietary behaviors. They continue to eat only what they like without considering goodness or health.

Otsuka wanted to find a way to motivate children and affect changes in their daily eating habits through an interactive, fun experience, based on something that they already love to do – by drawing pictures.

The key to this was an innovative smartphone app named 'SketchCook' which is available free in Google Play and iTunes. The smartphone was chosen as the campaign tool because children among the target audience are already familiar with such devices.

Once the app is downloaded, children are encouraged to draw their favorite dish – be it gratin, ’gyoza’, sandwiches, pancakes, soups or whatever – on a sheet of white paper in either crayon or pencil and then take a photo with their smartphone. ‘SketchCook employs machine-learning technology to interpret the meal the children have drawn – from the app’s cache of 12,000 children’s drawings – and immediately offers a variety of suggestions for ingredients, tips on preparing the dish, nutritional facts about the ingredients, plus suggestions for other dishes they can create to accompany their dish from some of the 3 million different recipes available in the Rakuten Recipe portal.

All these responses are reproduced in a fun way which children can readily embrace and respond to, with the wider objective being to encourage children to try cooking the meal themselves.

To help publicize the campaign and the app, the PR team arranged for a 'SketchCook Restaurant' to open for two days over May 19 and 20, 2018. The venue was an established restaurant in Tokyo’s up-market Meguro where children were invited to draw pictures of the dishes they love and photograph them. Then, with the app providing suggestions for alternative ingredients and cooking methods, two professional chefs were on hand to bring the dishes to life. To encourage print and electronic media coverage of the proceedings, two well-known chefs already familiar to Japanese audiences were invited and were made available for interviews and photo ops with the children and their young mothers. The interest this sparked saw the campaign used as a catalyst for a wider debate in mainstream Japanese media about children’s health, nutrition and education.