On April 19, Dairy Innovation Strategies 2023 took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, attracting dairy product R&D experts, company representatives and industry analysts from all over the world to discuss the innovation-driven development trends of the dairy industry.

“Innovation” and “sustainability” have become development trends of the global dairy industry. To open new prospects for sustainable development and promote innovation and upgrading of the dairy industry, the organizing committee invited Yili Group to attend the forum as an industry representative. Hittjo Homan, an expert from Yili Innovation Center Europe, delivered a keynote speech entitled “A New Wave of Sustainable Consumers: The Rise of the Globally Conscious Consumer”, sharing Yili’s innovations in making sustained efforts to follow the “consumer-centered” principle and meet the needs of all consumers, all consumption scenarios and all-lifecycle nutrition demands, and to guide its partners across the industrial chain toward a green, sustainable future.

 

The huge potential of China’s dairy consumption

According to Hittjo Homan, the per capita dairy consumption of China still lags far behind that of Europe though China’s per capita milk consumption keeps rising. As the awareness of healthy consumption increases, more and more people have realized the importance of dairy products to health. The newly-released Chinese Food Guide (2022) also recommends that a person shall have more dairy products and at least 300g of milk per day. Dairy products have become an indispensable source of nutrition.

Hittjo Homan believes that China’s dairy industry still faces huge development opportunities from a global perspective and China’s dairy consumption will continue to rise.

 

Ensuring people’s nutrition and health

To meet diversified dairy consumption needs, Yili is committed to producing healthy food to meet the needs of all consumers, all consumption scenarios and all-lifecycle nutrition demands. Hittjo Homan introduced Yili’s practices in this regard. 

In the field of infant health, Yili has begun to independently conduct breast milk research since 2003. It has built China’s first corporate database for breast milk research, and conducted frontier research together with world-renowned universities and research institutes including the University of Cambridge, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Wageningen University & Research and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in the Netherlands, etc.

In the field of children’s health, as early as in 2006, Yili launched a research project on children’s nutrition to analyze the internal absorption and transformation of various nutrient elements, as well as their synergistic and health effects. On the basis of children’s nutritional status and common nutritional problems, Yili developed and produced Yili cute star, a tailor-made milk brand for children. Supported by its years of research on Chinese mothers, infants and toddlers, Yili has made efforts for 139 Chinese invention patents and 22 foreign patents, making strong patents its great advantage.

The unique features of a local environment always give special characteristics to its inhabitants. Due to genetic and dietary differences, the intestinal  microbiota of Chinese people varies with that of people from other countries to a certain extent. Research shows that China’s local selected probiotics have more health benefits for the Chinese people. Through independent development and basic scientific research, Yili has introduced the brand of Yilife^®, a health solution positioned as “Chinese patented Probiotics” for Chinese people. Under the brand of Yilife^®, the patented strains Bifidobacterium animalis subsp.animalis BL-99, Lacticaseibacillus paracaseiK56 and ET-22 are targeted for intestinal health, weight management and oral health, respectively. The abovementioned three strains have been successfully applied in many products of Yili and well received by consumers, winning “Chinese patented Probiotics” worldwide recognition. So far, Yili has applied for over 80 domestic and foreign patents for Yilife^® and has been granted 25 patents.

 

In an effort to promote health of elderly people, Yili has conducted a survey on adults’ nutritional health in eight Chinese cities. Targeting at the health problems such as osteoporosis, hyperglycemia, hypertension and hyperlipemia which are common in elderly people, and following the idea of “food and medicine coming from the same source”, Yili uses the “health effects database of food and medicine” to screen and verify specific groups of health efficacy factors, applies healthy elements in milk powders for middle-aged and elderly people, and has successfully developed three types of milk powders for the middle-aged and elderly, namely XinHuo BonesEnergy formula milk powder, XinHuo HeartEnergy formula milk powder and XinHuo Anti-diabetes formula milk powder.

 

Toward a green and sustainable future

At the forum, Hittjo Homan introduced Yili’s practices to promote sustainable development. He said that green and sustainable development has become an inevitable trend of dairy development in the future, and Yili has already devoted itself to it.

 

As early as in 2007, Yili took the lead in putting forward the idea of “green leadership”. In 2009, it upgraded the idea into the “green industrial chain development strategy”, advocating the development idea integrating “green production, green consumption and green development”. In 2022, Yili took the lead in China’s food industry to launch its Yili Group Plan for A Net Zero Carbon Future and Yili Group Roadmap to Realize the Plan for A Net Zero Carbon Future and will realize industrial chain-wide carbon neutrality before 2050. So far, Yili has obtained China’s first “green electricity transaction certificate” of both the electricity and carbon markets, released five “zero-carbon products”, created five “zero-carbon factories”, and established the first net-zero alliance of the industry. Recently, Yili has extended its green footprints to the field of water resources protection, obtained the first “dual certification” of water footprint at the organizational and product levels of China’s food industry, and become the first Chinese enterprise approved to join the Water Action Agenda of the United Nations.

Guided by the goal of “New Vision for Value Creation”, Yili is striving to realize its corporate development strategy through innovation. With the future in mind, Yili will continue to center on consumers’ needs, intensify efforts for increasing investments in innovative research and development, produce more nutritious and healthy products, deepen the global industrial chain cooperation, push the industry toward a green and sustainable future, and contribute wisdom and strength to building a better world in which everyone is healthy.