4. Case-study/Comparison
4.1. Ming Yung
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4. Case-study/Comparison
4.1. Ming Yung
4.1.1. Description of the company and key demographics
Founded in 2008, Ming Yung is a chain of Japanese food restaurants belonging to the family of B Corporations. The company finds its foundations on the values of serving the underprivileged and helping the community. Through its 18 stores, 80% of the 200 employees come from underprivileged families. Bo Yung, the CEO, wants to help them become financially independent with a stable job and hence bring their families out of poverty (Lin, 2017). Bo Yung encountered many misadventures to create his business but he finally succeeded thanks to the generosity of a few people he met; that is the reason why he wants to help people back and share the benevolence he received gracefully. The company is doing well: it multiplied its turnover by 5 in two years, reaching 4 million US dollars in 2015. The company is considered as a real help to society thanks to the free meals it provides, as well as the 200 charity programs it participates in. The company received the B-score of 162, the highest score in the Asia Pacific Region of B Lab applications.
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As an architect in the first place, Bo Yung wanted to bring an environmental dimension to his social business and built his restaurants with green building materials. The company makes great economies with the energy it saves thanks to the network of the CEO in the field of green urbanism: they got cheaper-than-the-market green materials and saved money in architect fees.
Moreover, Ming Yung is a group comprising the chain of restaurants but also an architecture business. This latter helped the creation of buildings for the restaurants, enabling the company to benefit from complementary skills and competences of both businesses.
4.1.3. 7S Model
The aim of Ming Yung is to take care of the underserved and to serve the community. They also engage in talent cultivation by hiring unskilled workers and training them for the job. The key values of the company are benevolence and sharing the good around. Ming Yung provides healthy food at a reasonable price. They aim at serving social good by hiring under privileged people and offering free meals to those in need. In addition, they create a handicap friendly environment by adapting the layout of their kitchen to the needs of their disabled employees, with a wheelchair-friendly store design and kitchen seats equipped with auto-motion. The Japanese food chain counts 18 restaurants that are mostly located in shopping malls. Ming Yung is a group comprising the restaurant chain, the architecture firm Bo Yung created, as well as the Happy Food Company, an online bakery selling pineapple cake ran by Bo Yung’s sister. The structure of Ming Yung is rather flat, with 3 layers: one is the management (i.e. the head of the company), the second one comprises the restaurant managers, and the last layer is the workers
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(the cooks and waiters). The firm regularly donates small amount of money to the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families, as a way to thank them for helping him when he needed. As mentioned above, 80% of the workers are unskilled, that is why the company put in place a e-learning platform that is available to all the employees. The staff can find on it how to perform some important tasks, such as how to prepare a fish for instance. The management aimed at finding a creative and interactive way to train their employees. Watching videos is part of their daily life and combining fun and work is the solution they selected. Moreover, a high share of employees working at Ming Yung have been referred to the company by non-profit organizations or social agencies. Ming Yung wants to favor local hiring as much as possible.
Furthermore, the CEO trains his employees and suppliers to save energy and food in their daily working activities, supports local purchases and suppliers labelled with ISO 14001, 14064-1 and 14067 certificates. Finally, the company implemented a performant MIS system, including ERP and POS systems so as to facilitate information exchange, recording, management and governance, and that enables the company to be paperless. Most of Ming Yung’s workers come from under privileged and poor families and have been referred to the company by non-profit organizations and social agencies. Some of the employees are physically and mentally disabled and Ming Yung has now expanded its hiring process by employing silver age people. 80% of the workers at Ming Yung have not been hired for their cooking nor service skills, but demonstrated a potential that could make them become valuable workers with undeniable competences. The company ensures this switch thanks to the platform they put in place, that I mentioned above. Moreover, Ming Yung encourages employee enrichment through the job rotation it suggests: employees can then work for the restaurant and then switch to the architecture firm, and gain additional competencies. Furthermore, the staff is trained to recognize people who need assistance (further than just a free meal), and are responsible for
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contacting a social agency that will provide complementary assistance to the person in need.
By increasing their staff’s social responsibility, the company encourages them to increase their awareness of people surrounding them and giving them the chance to change their standpoint:
from people who need help, to people helping. The management of Ming Yung engages in an effort to create a home atmosphere for its employees: the restaurant managers are asked to pay attention to the less privileged employees to compensate their missing family love. Also, employee performance is not the most important goal for the company. Instead, close collaboration among employees is more valued, as well as the acceptation of the others who are seen as different than the majority. Moreover, Ming Yung’s management respects their employees in that they do not communicate about their disabilities. They want to ensure customers do not label them but consider them as any other restaurant employees.
4.1.4. Social Contribution
First of all, Ming Yung enables job opportunity creation especially for the deprived people.
They provide a job for unskilled and under privileged people with the aim of pulling them out of poverty by giving them the chance to be trained, while enjoying a social life. The company also gives free meals to people who consider themselves as poor. Indeed, a person can come and order a meal “ready to be consumed”. The staff will not check whether the customers have the financial means to pay for the meal as they do not want to betray customer privacy. However, so as to have an idea of how many free meals they provide, customers have the possibility to sign their name when benefiting from a free meal but that is not mandatory. Ming Yung believes the number of them adds up to 20,000 every month. The firm also works in collaboration with Jia Fu Zhong Xin, a non-profit organization that assists the under privileged. Whenever the
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NPO finds someone who needs a free meal, they send them to Ming Yung, and whenever Ming Yung receives a customer who seems to need further assistance, they contact Jia Fu Zhong Xin.
Furthermore, the company provides two free meals per day to its employees coming from Ming Yung’s kitchen, or sometimes from another restaurant to enable employees to enjoy a different kind of food.
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4.1.5. Economic benefits of being green and social
Ming Yung saves money by being eco-friendly. Indeed, thanks to the green architecture background of the CEO, the implementation of the green buildings has been cheaper for the firm, as mentioned in the section 4.1.2. Hence, the company benefits from being green thanks to the money they save by saving energy. In social terms, the company does not make more money per se. Indeed, the salaries it pays are a little higher than the Taiwanese market, even though the employees are disabled or unskilled. Also, the company does not benefit from a regular base of customers who come to support Ming Yung’s values. Why? Simply because the firm does not advertise on the fact that they are green nor social. In fact, they do not want to label their employees as underprivileged so that they do not feel downplayed or inferior, but they also do not want to get the pity from their customers. The CEO and his wife, contrary to some NPO in Taiwan that sell hand-craft products made and sold by disabled people and that have the clear image of being social, want to have a modern image for their restaurants. That is also the reason why Ming Yung does not get any advantages when concurring to a tender: the firm mostly opens new restaurants in shopping centers where competition is fierce with well-known restaurants that are already settled and that are famous for their good service of their good cuisine. Ming Yung must climb its way as any other food business. The firm only talks about the real core of their business when attending B-Corporation meetings. Knowing this, we can say that Ming Yung is genuinely and intrinsically good.
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Ming Yung undertakes social initiatives that make the business even more valuable. First of all, the CEO created an emergency fund in case his employees encounter a family crisis. This ensures he will be able to help his employees in case they have a problem. Also, in addition to their salaries, employees receive 30% of the firm’s net income. Moreover, Ming Yung has been part of over 200 charity programs between 2009 and 2016, each of them having an educational purpose (such as table manner or cultural activities). Half of them have been initiated by Ming Yung’s employees during their office hours, while the other half is supported by the firm’s donation to outside programs. Through these charity programs, the CEO engages his employees in the core business by making them actors and not mere followers. He believes that they will flourish by taking the lead of projects and that the business will eventually benefit, with employees being more committed to their job. Ming Yung also supports local orphanages and nursing homes by sending them rice (directly from the vendor) when they run out of it, and ensures stable vegetable prices by ordering from local and small farmers and absorb their production surplus.
4.1.7. Strategy for the future
The company plans to stop opening new restaurants for one or two years and rather focus on improving the service in store. Afterwards, the management would like to open a chain of restaurants in Cambodia so as to fight child prostitution with the same business model practiced in Taiwan. This is still a project that is not yet concrete as the firm first wants to focus on their Taiwanese businesses, but we might hear about such a project soon.
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Ming Yung has been certified B Corporation in March 2016. The CEO and his wife first heard about the label when participating in a conference by FoodCloud (a company that helps businesses source the food they use so as to ensure food traceability). Whereas the CEO did not know about it, his wife had already heard such a label existed when she was studying sociology.
Consequently, they decided to go to an event organized by B Corporation: they got along with the other members and realized they shared similar values. Therefore, they decided to fill in the questionnaire and apply for the B Corporation label. The process lasted 2 months and 10 days, which is very fast. As all the questions were in English and that they are not familiar with the language, they were helped by a Taiwanese they met at a B Corporation conference. On the 11th of January 2016, they filled in the questionnaire in a few hours. On the next day, they received the confirmation from the B-Lab that they did receive their application. The company received a call from the B-Lab on the 28th of January so as to understand the process and for a month, the company kept sending documents attesting their social programs, the rules of the company, how they use their profits, who their suppliers are, some information about their employees, their balance sheet and income statement and many, many more. On the 22nd of March 2016, Ming Yung received the label. As a coincidence, two days later, there was the first B Corporation conference in Asia. After receiving the label, a member of the B-Lab visited one of the restaurants, but the management did not know who, when or where that person went to.
Ming Yung feels a real sense of belonging to the B Corporation family and realized it can have more impact on society than what it currently has. The firm enjoys participating in B Corporation meetings once a month where they get more ideas about how they could improve and what they can do and share their experience to the other members. They now want to raise
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awareness about the label and about ecology to their employees and to their suppliers. Thanks to the label, Bo Yang was invited to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit by President Obama, in Silicon Valley, USA. This increased the company’s awareness and prestige, and rewarded the CEO and his wife for their efforts and encouraged them to follow the same track.