Our Sustainability Vision indicates our approach to sustainability management, which seeks to resolve social and environmental issues and achieve our corporate slogan of "For Ever Brighter Smiles" through our business.

In April 2022, we embarked on the Sustainability Medium- to Long-Term Plan 2030, setting our sights on fiscal 2030 as the goal for tackling a broad range of issues, and we are working on achieving these goals right now as we coordinate efforts in line with our Sustainability Medium-Term Business Plan.

The Sustainability Medium- to Long-Term Plan 2030 is centered on the three themes of Food and Wellness, Resources and the Environment, and People and Society. The plan places the focus on initiatives aimed at achieving KPIs for seven specific materialities : Contribution to Wellness, Food Safety and Reliability, Mitigation of and Adaptation of Climate Change, Environmental Consideration and Resource Recycling, Sustainable Raw Materials Procurement, Respect for Human Rights and Diversity, and Coexistence with Local Communities.

Aiming to enhance personal responsibility on the part of every employee

I consider the most important factor underpinning the Sustainability Medium- to Long-Term Plan 2030 to be if we can enhance personal responsibility on the part of every employee when it comes to sustainability. I personally think that the key to achieving this plan will be identifying just how we can pick up the pace for enhancing this personal responsibility during fiscal 2023.

To facilitate this, we are rolling out sustainability activities at production sites, where each business site determines their own specific goals and puts in place the required initiatives they deem necessary. We have assigned Sustainability Promotion Leaders at some 80 sites, including at domestic Group companies, to take the initiative and pave the way for these sustainability activities. We also hold the Sustainability Forum twice a year to provide the opportunity for Sustainability Promotion Leaders to get together and share their knowledge with one another for the benefit of all. I have actually taken part in this forum and exchanged views with those from business sites, and I felt that everyone was earnest in their efforts to implement sustainability activities.

Other efforts include the addition of the Sustainability Awards to our internal awards systems, which we call Morinaga Milk Awards, as a way to recognize the activities conducted at sites related to sustainability. When I traveled around various sites, I regularly heard people expressing their desire to apply for the Sustainability Awards. This shows just how popular these awards have become in our company, and I am overjoyed at witnessing the level of enthusiasm toward sustainability. I realize that there is a limit to how much any single site can contribute to sustainability activities on its own, so I think it would be ideal to coordinate our initiatives across various businesses segments and even with other companies.

We have so many sincere and earnest employees working at our Group, but at one stage I was concerned that there was insufficient room to allow their level of enthusiasm grow and take on new challenges. Yet during my recent interactions with employees, younger employees in particular mentioned that they wanted to be involved in these sustainability activities. This suggested to me that a gradual shift has been taking place, and that there are an increasing number of employees who feel like they want to take on such challenges.

I hope that my role will be to allow these budding thoughts to flourish and grow as high as possible. Ultimately, sustainability is the result of taking ongoing challenges. Implementing initiatives on a medium to long-term time span may make it difficult to determine the results, but I hope to develop the company into one where employees want to start taking on challenges and continue with those efforts. With this in mind, I want to implement sustainability management by continuing to engage in dialogue with employees—the key drivers behind sustainability activities at our business sites—and take heed of their feedback and thoughts.

Review of the First year of Sustainability Medium- to Long-Term Plan 2030

In the realm on Food and Wellness, we are aiming to contribute to healthy growth and extending healthy longevity. We came up with the health value and Five Domains of Wellness that we provide by combining the needs of our customers with our own potential. We then created the Health Strengthening Map based on this health value, with which we have been providing products and services. We have been working on the development and sales of products with greater protein content and foods with function claims that improve the environment in the large intestine for better bowel movements, with sales figures in the five domains of wellness reaching 1.1-times that of fiscal 2021.

The use of DX and AI is on the rise based on recent industry trends, but when we picture a world with greater AI accuracy, for instance, I feel that products that contribute to health will become limited to those that only provide positive value to our bodies. As times and our senses of value change, the value of products that contribute to health are also likely to undergo change, so we need to identify their core values in detail. To achieve this, we need to continue asking ourselves what customers perceive as true value, as well as continue engaging in dialogue with our stakeholders.

More than just supplying health value through products and services, we need to focus our efforts on raising public awareness related to health. Our Group is ramping up business efforts in Vietnam, where we launched the Smiles & Health for Children project in May 2023. There are many children in certain regions of Vietnam who are suffering from malnutrition, and the school lunches provided at kindergartens has become the source of their nutrition. We have been supporting the improvement of cooking facilities to ensure that appropriate school lunches can be provided at kindergartens, as part of efforts to improve the health and nutrition of children there.

The theme of Resources and the Environment covers an area in which the breadth of issues makes identifying appropriate actions difficult. Even if we are able to address one issue, other issues may crop up in other areas, making comprehensive judgments necessary when taking action. Our key efforts in fiscal 2022 were to engage in activities such as conservation of water resources, reduction of petroleum-derived virgin plastics, and mitigation of and adaptation to climate change through the supply chain.
One of these was addressing issues related to sustainability of dairy farmers that is directly affected by mitigating and adapting to climate change, and ensuring sustainable raw materials procurement. For us in the dairy industry, the milk that cows provide is our own raw material, so we need to look at ways to protect these cows and maintain sustainable dairy practices.To this end, we developed the MO-Lagoon for Dairy manure processing system that aims to curb methane emissions at farms and cut down on the amount of labor. This system is slated to reduce the amount of methane emitted during the manure processing stage, cut down the amount of work required by dairy farmers for processing manure, and help environmental conservation efforts by releasing treated water with a lower nitrogen load. In fiscal 2023, the system was put into test operation at the Nasu Gakuroku Dairy Farm operated by our Group. We hope to roll this system out to dairy farms throughout Japan as a way of contributing to sustainable dairy farming.

Other environmental initiatives include efforts to reduce petroleum-derived virgin plastic by switching to straws made with biomass plastic mixed material, internally recycling plastic logistics materials that are damaged or deteriorated and using them again within the Morinaga Milk Group.
Yet horizontal recycling initiatives for plastic are on the rise, and there is a limit to how much our Group can achieve by ourselves. I hope to study how we can address this issue throughout our entire value chain into the future.

Human capital is an essential component of People and Society. And the most important aspect of this is, without a doubt, the people. Our Group views people as assets, and our employees are dubbed human resources. I hope to make our company a comfortable one to work for, so that our employees continue to stay with us. This type of comfortable environment by no means imply that things are easy-going, but instead refers to achieving a certain level of quality for the assigned tasks, while forging career plans for employees and achieving a work-life balance.

An example that illustrates this is the development of systems that provides both male and female employees time for child raising in addition to their work roles, so that males and females can play an active role in the company. We provide a childcare leave system for male employees as part of these efforts, which exceeds the national standard of "100% paid leave (system that allows leave while providing 100% salary and bonuses) for fathers taking on childcare roles after the birth of their child. In this way, we are working to create systems where male and female employees can achieve their career goals with the ideal work-life balance—a figure that highlights this is the 90.5% ratio of male employees taking childcare leave in fiscal 2022.