The IDF Dairy Innovation Awards winners were officially announced at the 2023 World Dairy Summit held from October 16 to 19 in Chicago. Yili Group was the sole global dairy company honored with two IDF Dairy Innovation Awards. These awards commend Yili for its outstanding achievements in dairy innovation and sustainable products.
The Yili’s “Declaring Your Love to the Earth with Actions-SATINE Environmentally Sustainable Packaging with No Ink or Printing” campaign won the “Innovation in Sustainable Packaging” award. The individual boxes are designed in pure white without traditional ink printing, with only the necessary product information being laser-printed. With the caps made of sugarcane and the outer boxes of recycled milk containers, about 260kg of plastic can be saved for producing every 100,000 outer boxes, which can substantially reduce the consumption of raw materials and help Yili lead the way toward industry’s sustainable development. Richard Walton, a member of the awards judging panel, said, “The innovation and sustainability aspects that Yili is bringing to the market today are extremely impressive. Specifically on the packaging, it’s a beautiful packaging, with no ink, and then beyond that it is recyclable on the other end, which is very impressive.”
Yili “Ambient Cheese Lollipop” also scored a success by winning the “Innovation in New Product Development with Focus on Food Safety and Consumer Nutrition” award. By adding the bifidobacterium lactis BL-99 into the product, Yili has launched a new category of children’s cheese lollipops that can be stored at room temperature, overcoming the limits of traditional cold-chain logistics and low-temperature sales in the market. “The ambient cheese lollipop was an amazing idea which I’ve never even imagined before. It’s very good and brings nutrition to people. The ambient innovations are exceptional because you can now bring dairy goodness and even probiotics to areas where they weren’t available before,” added Richard Walton.
The continuous stream of achievements on innovation is underpinned by Yili’s global innovation network. To date, Yili has established 15 innovation centers globally, launched collaborative endeavors on innovative R&D of healthy food with its partners, and pursued cooperation on innovation with overseas colleges and universities, scientific research institutions and partners including the International Life Sciences Institute, Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, the University of Lincoln in New Zealand, the Technical University of Munich in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the U.K., as well as domestic institutions of higher education such as Peking University, China Agricultural University, Sichuan University and Jiangnan University, with the aim of pooling together knowledge for dairy innovation from around the world and facilitating cooperation on innovation across the entire industrial chain.
Yili has been committed to taking a consumer-centered approach, making breakthroughs and building up competitive advantages in core technologies to make healthy products suitable for all groups of people, all consumption scenarios and full life cycles.
