February 2020 – DSF and the Japanese Dairy Sector
February 2020 – DSF and the Japanese Dairy Sector
J-Milk on behalf of the Sustainability Working Group involving Japan's three largest dairy Companies, Meiji, Snow Brand and Morinaga and J-Milk itself, hosted a visit by the DSF to explore collaboratively the most appropriate membership model that added the most value domestically whilst ensuring an important contribution to the DSF’s monitoring and reporting activities. Several meetings during the week with different industry groups saw unanimous agreement and enthusiasm to better collaborate on sustainability activities. The Japanese dairy sector like other global dairying regions is concerned to do this in a professional way with a particular interest in ensuring the farming community are part of this process and have the opportunity to shape domestic dairy sustainability efforts.
Though only just initiating this collaborative process and no final decisions have yet been made, discussions predominantly focused on the aggregator membership model where the sector collaborates domestically on common sustainability challenges, resulting in the dual outcome of valuable (country wide) industry data in support of their continuous improvement narrative and the contribution of the DSF indicator metrics data input to the DSF for the annual reporting requirements. The DSF Framework model allows the common issues to be identified at the ‘local level. Improvement programs implemented by different organizations may be very different. The DSF Indicator metrics, provide the alignment in data generation, quantifying progress and permitting the necessary aggregation of data.
Many thanks to both Yoshinori Suzuki, J-Milk and Richard Walton, Meiji for their leadership and considerable effort in making this very full week of activity possible and positive!