Yakult Honsha

is a Japanese company founded in 1955 to sell its flagship product, Yakult—a beverage made using industrial lactic milk, a bacterial strain discovered by Minoru Shirota in the 1920s. Yakult Honsha is a multinational corporation that sells various other products and owns the Tokyo Yakult Swallows 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.