Yakult Honsha is a Japanese company founded in 1955 to sell its flagship product,

Yakult is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain '' Lacticaseibacillus casei'' Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha, based in Tokyo. It is distributed through convenience stores and supermarkets in single-servin ...

—a beverage made using industrial lactic milk, a bacterial strain discovered by

Minoru Shirota was a Japanese microbiologist. In the 1930 Shirota identified a strain of lactic acid bacteria that is part of normal gut flora that he originally called ''Lactobacillus casei Shirota,'' which appeared to help contain the growth of harmful b ...

in the 1920s. Yakult Honsha is a multinational corporation that sells various other products and owns the

Tokyo Yakult Swallows The Tokyo Yakult Swallows () are a Japanese professional baseball team competing in Nippon Professional Baseball's Central League. Based in Shinjuku, Tokyo, they are one of two professional baseball teams based in Tokyo, the other being the Yom ...

baseball team, in addition to the Roaring Raymonds. The company regularly promotes what the ''Financial Times'' called its "idiosyncratic philosophy of 'Shirota-ism'", namely that it should sell its products at an affordable price, and that a healthy intestine promotes longer life.

History

Since 1963, Yakult has employed women known as "Yakult ladies" (ヤクルトレディー; ''Yakuruto redī'') or "Yakult aunties" (ヤクルトおばさん; ''Yakuruto obasan'') to sell or deliver the products to individuals at their homes while traveling on bicycles or motorcycles. The initiative, meant to utilize Japanese women in the workforce, is responsible for up to 60% of all bottled Yakult sales. However, the number of Yakult ladies in Japan has declined from 65,700 in 1973 to 42,500 in 2009. In the early 1980s, Carlos Kasuga, whose parents immigrated to Mexico from Japan in the 1930s, founded Yakult Mexico. In 1998, the company gained international attention for its losses in the derivatives market, totaling US$813 million. In 2000,

The Japan Times ''The Japan Times'' is Japan's largest and oldest English-language daily newspaper. It is published by , a subsidiary of News2u Holdings, Inc.. It is headquartered in the in Kioicho, Chiyoda, Tokyo. History ''The Japan Times'' was launched by ...

reported that Yakult Honsha had been paying a criminal syndicate annually to keep them from disrupting shareholder meetings, but that the money was concealed as payments to an advertising company. Yakult established a US subsidiary and committed to building a factory in

Fountain Valley, California Fountain Valley is a suburban city in Orange County, California. The population was 57,047 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. History The area encompassing Fountain Valley was originally inhabited by the Tongva people. Europea ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

in 2010, and it began production in 2014. Yakult is manufactured and sold in India under a 50:50 joint-venture with

Danone Danone S.A. () is a French multinational corporation, multinational food-products corporation based in Paris. It was founded in Barcelona, Spain. It is listed on Euronext Paris where it is a component of the CAC 40 stock market index. Some of t ...

. For over a decade,

owned 21 percent of Yakult Honsha shares, but in 2018 Danone announced it would reduce its holdings in Yakult to 7 percent, while still remaining the largest Yakult Honsha shareholder.

History

Notes

References

Further reading