Microbes Gone Wild

The global cult status of a probiotic drink

There’s an official term for all the nutrient-enhanced drinks and snacks filling grocery shelves and convenience store fridges. They’re called “functional foods,” — substances that deliver not pleasure or even satiety (at least not chiefly), but an isolate, like a vitamin or beneficial bacteria, thought to improve health. That they taste good is merely a means to an end — palatable packaging designed by food scientists and doctors in order to achieve their goals.

In Japan, the first country to create a government seal for what they call “Food for Specified Health Uses,” one of the most popular bottled drinks on the market is functional at heart. Yakult, a fermented milk drink, tastes a bit like Skittles dissolved in skim milk. It’s a vehicle for the company’s proprietary strain of lactobacillus and is currently sold in more than 30 countries. In recent years, as Americans become better acquainted with the notion of gut bacteria, the Yakult Honsha company has been working to establish itself in the mainstream U.S. market. This summer, it opened its first factory here, in Orange County, California.

Yakult has its roots in the research of Elie Metchnikoff, the Russian bacteriologist and Nobel laureate best known for his research on the immune system. Metchnikoff also pioneered aging research, and became convinced that the secret to long life lay in the gut. He subscribed to a theory called “autointoxication” which holds that putrefying food in the digestive system poisons the body, leading to aging and death. Captivated by tales of yogurt-swilling Bulgarians who supposedly lived to 120 years or more, Metchnikoff thought introducing beneficial bacteria in soured milk — lactobacillus bulgaricus, to be specific — into the gut, would arrest the bad bugs’ growth or even destroy them altogether. (This idea doesn’t sound so out of place today in this era of “intestinal gardening,” but he had wilder ones; for example, he considered the digestive tract to be obsolete and advocated for its surgical removal.)

Metchnikoff’s work spawned countless products claiming to bring the benefits of “scientifically soured milk” to the masses, including cultured bonbons, and his own yogurt pill, called Le Ferment. But, as food historian Harvey Levenstein writes in Fear of Food, Metchnikoff’s ideas fell from favor when two Yale scientists discovered that lactobacillus bulgaricus couldn’t survive in the digestive system. Metchnikoff inspired considerable snark, with one writer calling him “the modern Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Immortal Youth and finding it in the Milky Whey.” Metchnikoff’s death at age 71 didn’t do much to support his theories.

But there were still believers, like Minoru Shirota, a Japanese microbiologist who wanted to fight cholera and dysentery with good bacteria. He couldn’t find a lactobacillus bulgaricus strain that could survive the tribulations of the alimentary canal, either, so he turned to bacteria harvested from human feces. In 1930, he isolated a particularly hardy strain that could withstand bile and stomach acid. It was later named in his honor, Lactobaciullus casei Shirota.

Shirota needed a mechanism to get the bacteria into peoples’ intestines, so he developed a beverage – a solution of skim milk powder, glucose and sugar – that was inoculated with L. casei Shirota and fermented slowly over a week. He named it Yakult (called yakuruto in Japan), echoing the Esperanto word for yogurt, jahurto. Unlike Metchnikoff’s grandiose claims, Shirota gave his drink a modest slogan: Stronger than most.

At first, Yakult came in little glass bottles, which were later swapped for the petite plastic ones still used today. Designed by Isamu Kenmochi, the father of Japanese Modern design, the bottle is nipped in at the middle and scaled to a child’s hand. Its shape encourages “sipping, not gulping” the company says. The single-serving container is intended to keep the drink from being colonized by other bugs during storage — and it makes it easy to follow the company’s recommendation to drink one every day. Japan’s intellectual property court granted the Yakult bottle a 3D trademark in 2010 – it was only the second bottle, after CocaCola’s – to get one.

It might seem strange that a dairy drink took off in a country where, at the time of its creation, people consumed little milk. But a similar product, Calpis, was already on the market, inspired by a Mongolian fermented mare’s milk called koumis, writes Tomotari Mitsuoka, a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. (Calpis, by the way, can be bought in the U.S., sold under the name Calpico, because it sounds less like “cow piss,” or so says the internet.)

After the war, Yakult’s operations expanded, thanks to a fleet of congenial mothers called Yakult Ladies who were paid to tout Yakult’s benefits to their neighbors and deliver it by bicycle. (There’s another strain of saleswomen that thrives in Japan – “skin ladies,” who sell condoms door to door.) Today, there are about 80,000 Yakult Ladies in the world – half of whom are in Japan. In the Financial Times, Ben Bland and Jonathan Soble described a day for Sumarni, an Indonesian Yakult Lady:

Dressed in a red-and-white checked shirt with matching trousers and hijab, she is one of about 5,000 “Yakult Ladies” spearheading an expansion drive in Indonesia by the quirky Japanese company that makes the drinks.

Booking sales, however, is never easy. “It is hard to sell to the A-class customers because their security guards and maids won’t let us speak directly to them,” she explains.

At Yakult’s low-rent distribution centre in Cipete, south Jakarta, the walls are plastered with posters displaying sales patter to be used in every conceivable situation from when a potential customer is reading the Koran to when they are cooking dinner.

The company tries to keep morale high through a daily midday meeting. The agents pray together and chant corporate slogans (“Keep going, each time higher” and “Yakult should be delivered whether it’s boiling hot or pouring with rain”) before a hitherto quiescent Japanese executive strides to the front of the room and pumps his hands in the air, shouting “Ganbaru”, a Japanese slogan that means “tough it out.”

In Japan, Yakult’s parent company, Yakult Honsha makes a range of other functional foods; among them are CHOBI, a “beauty drink” for the ladies, and Toughman, an energy drink for the guys. The company also has a cosmetics line based on beneficial bacteria. According to company lore, Yakult ladies discovered the beauty benefits of Yakult when they washed out used bottles. The company also owns the Yakult Swallows, a professional baseball team, and has a pharmaceutical company that makes cancer drugs.

Globally, however, Yakult Honsha mainly sells its eponymous drink, and since the Japanese market is stagnant, it’s working to expand its global reach. China’s a crucial new market – and the rumors circulating there that the drink can increase breast size can’t be hurting sales. Most of Yakult’s business is concentrated in Asia; Mexico is its strongest market in the Americas. So, when the company started expanding into the U.S. it first hit Asian and Latino markets, capitalizing on nostalgia. Since 2009, it’s been gradually moving into the mainstream, starting with southern California, then the rest of the state and now much of the west, with plans to keep expanding slowly.

Sadly, Yakult Ladies won’t be part of the eastward expansion. The company decided that going door to door doesn’t make sense since most U.S. women work and aren’t home, according to the Financial Times. Instead, it tapped what might be our modern-day analogue — mommy bloggers, giving them a 10-day supply of the drinks, and paying them to write about it. It also started selling at military commissaries, since lots of the families there have been stationed overseas and know Yakult’s products.

When it comes to TV commercials, Yakult seems to have learned a lesson from its competitor, Dannon’s Activia. That company’s awkward ads launched a thousand poop jokes and resulted in Dannon paying $21 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it made false claims about its yogurt’s health benefits. Yakult’s ads have a light, and non-scatalogical, touch. One, the “Love your insides” campaign, features a gauzy montage of a strangely charming, gurgly fuzzy pink colon and her human host riding horses on the beach, whirling around on the grass, and watching the sunset, hand-in-hand.

It’s too early to say whether Yakult will take off in the U.S., but even as the company works toward world domination, they’re nurturing extraplanetary aspirations. This spring, Yajult announced a six-year study looking at the effects of Shirota’s lactobacillus strain on people living at the International Space Station.

All Illustrations by Monica Ramos.