Owing to the variety and wideness of its product range, the Morinaga Group uses packaging materials made of diversified materials. It also uses packing materials for the storage and transportation purposes.
We are promoting environmentally conscious initiatives for packaging materials that involve multifaceted issues such as plastic issues, deforestation, and climate change.
In FY2020/3, Morinaga identified the amount of packaging materials used by the Company and established a plan for reducing the amount of major packaging materials such as paper (incl. paper boxes), plastics (incl. plastic films), and cardboard (incl. cardboard boxes and cases). In the future, we will further promote: the reduction of use of fossil resource-based plastics; the shift to FSC®-certified paper sourced from well-managed forests and other controlled sources; and the shift to packaging materials with lower emissions.
We replaced packaging materials for some Morinaga Chocolate products (DARS and Carre de chocolat) and the Morinaga Biscuits series (including Marie Biscuits) with those made of FSC®-sourced paper. We intend to promote the shift to the FSC®-certified paper and expand the scope of its use to other products in sequence.
In February 2020, we reduced the amount of plastics used in the “in Jelly” brand’s packages by saving the weight of plastic cap and straw by approximately 9% (approximately 70 tons per year) compared to the conventional level. In addition, we partly replaced the printing ink used in the product with plant-derived, environmentally-friendly biomass ink. At the same time, we adopted easier-to-open caps to improve customer convenience.
Since 2013, we have used plant-derived plastics in part of stick packs of the Milk Cocoa Stick Type product series. This enabled us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 1.1 tons a year over the entire life cycle, compared to cases where petroleum-derived materials are used.
The Company considers its key tasks as a food manufacturer to be delivery of safe, reliable products to customers and procurement of sustainable raw materials that are not harmful to the global environment or society.
“I wish to provide delicious, highly nutritious Western confectionaries to the people of Japan.” Morinaga & Co., Ltd. was launched with this strong desire as expressed by Taichiro Morinaga, the company’s founder.
The Morinaga Group is aware of various social issues that it faces at every stage of its value chain (planning and development, procurement, production, distribution and sales, and consumption/disposal) and is promoting measures to resolve them.
Society as a whole is becoming increasingly health-conscious and there is a growing need to take proper nutrients in an easy and functional way. The Morinaga Group has been working on the development of wellness products that can help people lead a healthy and happy life.