SINGAPORE -- Hundreds of people trek every day to the northern tip of Singapore to tour a factory where the local unit of Japan's Yakult Honsha fills up to 283,000 tiny plastic foil-capped bottles with probiotic cultured milk each day.
The 80 million bottles that Singaporeans drank last year made them fourth in per person consumption among the 40 markets where Yakult Honsha sells its signature drink. Yet local sales of the original version, billed as beneficial for digestion, have dipped over the past two years, since the company was forced to add a nutritional grade "D" to its labels here and to halt nearly all advertising of the product due to its relatively high sugar content.
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