A Japanese producer of milk and dairy products came up with an ingenious way of motivating kids to finish their milk bottles at lunch – decorating the bottles with manga comics.

Seki Milk, a milk producer and processor in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, has been providing its products to local schools, but in recent years the company had seen consumption of milk drop significantly. According to its own research, the majority of school students (around 65% of them) were not finishing their milk bottles at lunch, which caused unnecessary food waste and also deprived them of calcium and other valuable nutrients. However, if you’re a parent, you probably already know that getting kids to eat things that are good for them isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Seki Milk came up with an original and fun way to motivate children to finish their milk – manga bottles.

If you’re unfamiliar with otaku culture, manga is the Japanese version of Western comics and is popular among people of all age and walks of life all over the world. It was precisely this general appeal that inspired Seki Milk to use it as the main draw of its milk bottles. The company partnered with a manga studio to produce an original manga series and print it on its transparent milk bottles.

Seki Milk teamed up with ad agency VOJ and manga illustrator aamiakihiko to create an intriguing manga series that students could only read after emptying the milk bottles of their nutritious content. The manga is printed on the bottle in white paint, so it is only visible after the bottle is emptied of milk.

Although students don’t technically have to consume the milk in order to get access to the manga art on the bottles (they can just throw out the milk), Seki Milk definitely deserves credit for its innovative solution to a delicate problem.