Yakult Honsha

Yakult Honsha Company, Limited (株式会社ヤクルト本社, Kabushiki-gaisha Yakuruto 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.