Yakult Company Visit 24thMarch,2014
We appreciate to have a chance to visit the Yakult factory in 24/3. Yakult is one of the well-known health drinks in Hong Kong. Everyone who grown up in Hong Kong must tried Yakult before. We were really exciting about exploring the company logistic and supply chain.
Introduction
Yakult is a probiotic dairy product made by fermenting a
mixture of skimmed milk with a special strain of
the bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota.
It was created by Japanese scientist Minoru Shirota. In 1935, he started
manufacturing and selling Yakult. Official claims state that the name is
derived from jahurto, an Esperanto word
for "yogurt". Since then, Yakult
has also introduced a line of beverages for the Japanese market that contain bifid bacterium breve bacteria, and has
also used its lactobacilli research to develop cosmetics. More recently, the
Yakult Honsha played a major role in developing the chemotherapy drugs. 
After its introduction in Japan and Taiwan, Yakult
was first sold in Brazil in 1966, due to the large number of Japanese
immigrants in the country, before it was marketed elsewhere. Today,
Yakult is sold in 31 countries include China and Hong Kong. Although its bacteria
cultures are provided from a mother strain from Japan regardless of production location.
Presentation
During the presentation, the
presenter introduces the content of Yakult to us. Then she played an video
which show the foundation of the first Yakult and introduce the company vision and mission. There is an impressing
case shown in presentation is that a foreign infant got an unknown disease
which made her stomach swell. After regular drunk of Yakult, The Illness gradually
recovered.
Q n A
1. It is observed that the rumor to Yakult products in China such as preventing cancers, whitening faces leading to the rising demand on Yakult. Are there any benefits and drawbacks caused by the rumor? Are there any follow up actions to deal with this rumor?
Yakult is doing its best to increase public knowledge of their products. They are putting more effort and resources in marketing and promotion. The rumor is not an big driver of sales of its products.
2. To deal with the large demand in mainland China, what is the reason for Yakult not to build up the sales network in China?
Yakult has factory in mainland China already. The reason why people are still rushing to Hong Kong purchasing Yakult is because of their trust in HK food safety standard and a cheaper price of HK Yakult.
3. Yakult has been increasingly putting focus on Guangzhou such as building a second manufacturing facility. With improving transport infrastructure at Pearl River Delta, does your company have the intention to move the production plant from Hong Kong to Guangzhou? Why or why not?
As Yakult is a diary product with probiotics, it has only 1 month expired period after production. For the above suggestion, with the concern of serving the freshest product to customers, we temporally won’t move our plant to Guangzhou.
4. As Yakult contains the milk powder which makes it a dairy product, it is harder to preserve than the other kinds of drinks. How does Yakult manage to preserve their products with such a large amount of them are being sold in the market? How does Yakult manage to control the inventory as the demand is sometimes hard to predict?
We has our own trucks to transport the products to the retailer which are all conditioning trucks. We have good demand management that we produce exactly what we need to prevent over-stocking or expiration of products.
5. In HK, Yakult only have one to two products. Will Yakult consider using its unique existing technology to diversify itself and expand the market? For example, adding new product lines to sell related healthy products such as yogurt or Yakult sweet or others.
As the market size was not large enough in HK and the plant capacity was fully occupied. We are not going to introduce others favor to HK market as it will raise the burden of the production line.
Production line visit
The staff shown us the three
production line of Yakult which were highly automate with only one inspector on
each line.
However there is a bottle
neck on the production line which was the production of bottle is much slower
than the production of drinks. Thus, sometimes the machine needs to work 24
hours in order to satisfy the demand.
Moreover, it introduces a
new technology of packing Yakult on to wooden pallets which is compactable with
standard pallet truck. The machine increase the productivity of the whole
supply chain by eliminate the time waste by human force.
Reflection
References:
1. Yakult HK home page. (2014). Retrieved April 21, 2014, from http://www.yakult.com.hk/home.htm
2. Search result of "Probiotic" from Wikipedia. (2014). Retrieved April 22, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probiotic
