Health-supplement ads → provincial People's Committees from 1 July 2026

Vietnam is decentralising the approval of advertising content for health-supplement products from the central Vietnam Food Administration (VFA) to the People's Committees of provinces and centrally-administered cities. The change takes effect on 1 July 2026.

The shift is mandated by Resolution 21/2026/NQ-CP (signed 29 April 2026), the Government's omnibus measure to cut red tape and simplify administrative procedures in healthcare. The underlying advertising regime — Decree 15/2018/ND-CP, Article 27 Section 5 — remains intact; only the authority that signs off on each advertising-content verification certificate changes.

Current procedure (unchanged after the transfer):

• Companies submit a complete advertising-content dossier; the agency must issue or deny the certificate within 10 working days of receiving a valid file.
• The reviewing agency may request one revision, citing the specific legal basis for each comment.
• Applicants have 10 working days to submit the revision; after 90 days without a response the file lapses.
• Approved certificates are published on the agency website and the food-safety database — the receiving provincial People's Committee inherits the same disclosure obligation.

Legal framework to re-read before 1 July 2026:

• Resolution 21/2026/NQ-CP (29 April 2026) — the decentralisation mandate, effective 1 July 2026.
• Decree 15/2018/ND-CP, Article 27 — the substantive procedure for verifying advertising content for food products, which survives the transfer of authority.
• Circular 09/2015/TT-BYT — Ministry of Health detailed rules on advertising healthcare-related goods, including the format of the advertising-content dossier and post-approval reporting.
• Law on Advertising 16/2012/QH13 — the head statute; health-supplements and medicines are regulated as "special products" requiring pre-clearance.
• Law on Food Safety 55/2010/QH12 — the parent law defining "health supplements" and assigning regulatory competence.
• Decree 38/2021/ND-CP — the administrative-penalty regime for cultural and advertising violations; the national framework continues to govern enforcement even after approvals move to the provinces.

Implications for foreign sponsors and importers:

• Dossier intake will fragment across 63 provincial People's Committees. Expect interpretation variance — particularly around claim text ("supports immunity", "improves digestion") and the link between claim wording and the underlying scientific dossier.
• File the application with the People's Committee of the province where the marketing-authorisation holder is registered. For multi-province campaigns, plan ahead which People's Committee will be the lead approver.
• The Ministry of Health is not retreating: officials told VnEconomy that post-approval monitoring will intensify across television, social media (Facebook, TikTok, Zalo) and e-commerce platforms (Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop). Discrepancies between the approved copy and the deployed creatives are the most common enforcement trigger.
• Keep clean evidence packs: an exact match between (a) the approved advertising-content certificate, (b) the product self-declaration / registration file held at VFA, and (c) the deployed marketing assets across every channel.

What it means in practice:

• Faster approvals where the receiving People's Committee is well-staffed; potential slowdowns where local capacity is thin.
• The claim wording in the original VFA product registration becomes the legal ceiling for what any provincial People's Committee can later approve — invest in that file.
• Centralised post-market monitoring means a non-compliant ad in one province can still trigger national administrative-penalty proceedings under Decree 38/2021/ND-CP.

Source: VnEconomy, "From 1 July, provincial People's Committees will license functional-food advertising" (in Vietnamese).