Aiming to obtain information on Thailand, a country well-known for butterfly pea cultivation.

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

Our main business has long been the design and production of lighting equipment in Shiga prefecture. After the Lehman Brothers collapse, however, considering the business stability in the food industry, we launched a new business of developing equipment for the production of food ingredients. Along the way, we came across a plant species named Butterfly pea. As we ground the flower using our new production technology, it produced beautiful blue particles. Based on the idea of utilizing the fine blue extract of the butterfly pea flowers in Thailand and Laos for food coloring, for the last three years we have been developing blue-colored herbal teas, food coloring ingredients and food products, and exporting dried flowers. Thailand’s popular butterfly pea flower is not yet recognized by most in Japan and the rest of the world. We found various references in our attempt to learn more about the flower, but had difficulty obtaining information as a majority of it is written in Thai. We applied for the internship program to obtain more information to deepen our knowledge about the flower through collaborative work with an intern.

Studying papers in Thai regarding butterfly pea cultivation and the efficacy of the flower

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

Since it was an online internship, we asked Jay-san to participate mainly in researching papers and conducting field surveys during the activity period. The Butterfly pea flower is also known for benefitting hair growth and is used in shampoos in Thailand. The activity involved advanced paper research on the verification of its hair growth efficacy, its benefits as a health food, as well as safety and health hazards. We acted spontaneously and provided each other with research papers.
Also, she studied the reality of the plantations, the pesticides used today in Thailand, the production country of the butterfly pea and furthermore, what kinds of food they are used for. Although some papers were quite technical and advanced, she read through them and summarized the key conclusions in an exact manner in English. We had already gathered information about the Butterfly Pea to some extent, but the intern helped us find out more through this detailed study.

Owing to the strong expertise of the intern, we were able to obtain useful information.

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

Upon entry into the butterfly pea flowers market in the food ingredient industry, we searched for various papers. While we have read through most of the papers written in English up to now, those in the Thai language were omitted due to the language barrier. Thanks to Jay-san, we could finally shed light on them. She had a postgraduate degree in agriculture and had strong expertise. She understood and studied complicated technical papers on its benefits for hair growth and as a health food. Not only that, she identified the key conclusions from the papers written in Thai and summarized them carefully in English using figures and tables for better understanding. Her dedicated work enabled us to obtain information that is highly valuable to us. We are sorry that due to the Covid-19 pandemic, she had to work at her desk all the time and was unable to visit the commissioned farms on the premises of our company and carry out field research on cultivation. We will re-examine the data we obtained based on her research and utilize what we have achieved this time to further progress our new business.