About one in four Filipino children under five is stunted, according to the latest national nutrition survey, and the rate has gone up for the first time in a decade. It now sits at 25.3 percent, up 1.7 percentage points from 2023.
Malnutrition in a child’s early years affects how they develop and learn, which is part of why school meals keep coming up in conversations about how well Filipino kids do in class.
One restaurant chain is trying to chip in through its menu.
JT’s Manukan Grille, the chicken inasal brand co-founded by actor Joel Torre and his wife Cristy, has teamed up with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) for “JT’s Meals for the Kids,” a campaign supporting schoolchildren and food-insecure families in the Philippines.
JT’s contributes ₱1 for every order of grilled chicken inasal sold across its branches in the Philippines, Dubai, and Singapore, with the money channeled through WFP’s ShareTheMeal platform.
The campaign launched in December 2025 and aims to raise ₱12 million over two years. The funds support WFP’s work in the country, from school meals and emergency response to resilience-building and government-led social protection.
On the school meals side, WFP has been working with the government to scale up home-grown school feeding, which serves daily hot meals cooked with ingredients from local farmers.
The chain is short by design: farmers grow the food, school kitchens cook it, and children eat it in class.
JT’s reports that the campaign funded 22,461 school meals in its first 100 days. The meals go through WFP’s home-grown school feeding program to children in Isabela and the Bangsamoro region, with ingredients sourced from local farmers.
In late June 2026, the brand held Inasal Nights: Showbiz Edition, a fundraising party built into Torre’s birthday celebration, with various A-list Filipino celebrities in attendance. Torre said the campaign had raised around ₱2 million by then, enough for roughly 45,000 meals. Torre admitted the campaign is still far from its goal, and used the night to ask guests to help spread the word.
Next time you’re at JT’s, know that your order already counts. If you’d like to give more than a peso, a few taps on ShareTheMeal’s donation page or the Grab app will do it.
