Message from the President

In January 2024, we established the “Sustainability Promotion Committee" to strengthen our efforts to realize a sustainable society and defined KPIs that represent the targets of our initiatives for the five materialities (critical issues) identified in the previous two years. Each KPI was assigned a numerical target to be achieved by FY2030, with a keen awareness of our contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be realized by 2030. Each of the “five materialities" represents an important topic that underpins the Group's relevance in society, but the focus on “people" is particularly important to us as a company guided by the “For the People" management philosophy, and we recognize that we must take this issue more seriously than any other party. In terms of KPIs, we have set KPIs to improve employee engagement along with the percentage of female employees and managers, and the percentage of employees taking paid leave. In addition to implementing life-work balance initiatives and fostering an organizational culture that encourages positive change, I personally believe it is critical that employees actually feel that the company is growing.

In addition, as a “food company," we believe it is our social responsibility to expand “store community contribution activities" through community kitchens for children and other forms. The employees who have participated in these activities say that we should do more and that they want to do it, demonstrating a level of attention that is much higher than mine. “Eradicating poverty" is listed at the top of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and I am personally committed to addressing this issue. In terms of materiality KPIs, our goal for FY2030 is to establish a network of initiatives across all prefectures. At the same time, we plan to increase the number of meals served throughout the Group and expand the total number of employees participating in these initiatives.

As part of our efforts to address environmental issues and climate change, we have set targets and KPIs for recycling waste from our domestic factories, reducing the use of certain plastics, and sustaining the Eco Mark certification of our restaurants. However, addressing environmental issues and reducing our environmental footprint is a highly complex undertaking due to the interrelated nature of various factors within our operations and supply chain. In addition, environmental initiatives evolve over time, as responses that were effective a decade ago may not be effective today, and vice versa. What we need here is to examine whether the environmental initiative contributes to cost reduction and quality improvement. In other words, our basic position is that using economic value as the measure of our efforts should make our environmental activities sustainable.

In the future, we will drive sustainability initiatives across the company that lead to the enhancement of our corporate and social value by setting materiality KPIs that enable monitoring. Our business operations have reached a point where profitability, a long-standing concern for the Group, is showing signs of improvement and stabilization. As a unified Group, we will embrace the challenge of becoming a growth-oriented company