Beer Sales by Category

There was an interesting graph in yesterday's The Japan Food Journal. The exact numbers were not given, but you can eye the graph and come pretty close. The graph was a monthly measure of beer sales by category (beer, happoshu, 3rd category) compared with the sales in the previous year.

Two factors are clear:
1) 3rd category beer is what is carrying the market while beer sales have suffered big setbacks. This is likely do to the large price differences which have been discussed in this blog before.
and
2) there appears to be an unexpected boom in beer sales. 3rd category beer sales in July were up 40% over last year, happoshu 3% and beer 2%. The likely reason for this is the unusually hot summer we are having.

Arable Land in Japan

Continuing with the same article I have mentioned the past two days, there are some interesting numbers of land utilization in Japan. The numbers below are for the years 1985, 1995 and 2005.

Percentage of Arable Land Utilized (not sure how you go over 100%)
105.1% 97.7% 93.4%

Hectares of Farm Land Abandoned to Other Uses (in thousands)
135 244 386

Most of the other numbers in the report are less interesting as they deal with the case Japan is trying to make about Japanese consumers preferring Japanese produced food.

Food Self-Sufficiency 2

The numbers I mentioned yesterday were based on calories by the way. An article on the government report was published in The Japan Food Journal (Japanese) on 2008.07.18.

Some more interesting numbers from the same article are the following, concerning Japanese grain imports (how much and from where).

Wheat (148.9 billion yen)
　America 53.8%, Canada 24.2%, Australia 21.9%
Soy (149.1 billion yen)
　America 76.5%, Canada 9.2%, Brazil 8.1%, China 6.2%
Corn (300.8 billion yen)
　America 96.3%, China 2.8%

Food Self-Sufficiency

These numbers below are from the Japanese government, so they might be calculated in a way favorable to the message Japan wants to present, but however you look at it, Japan is a major food importer and worries about self-sufficiency and sudden changes in world markets are natural. The recent surge in food prices is a good example.

Australia 237%
Canada 145%
USA 128%
France 122%
Germany 84%
Great Britain 70%
Italy 62%
Switzerland 49%
South Korea 46%
Japan 39%

Environmental Measures by Food Companies

There was an interesting article in the 2008.07.18 evening edition of the Nikkei Shimbun. It mentioned some of the measures taken by various food companies to be more environmentally friendly.

Seven Eleven - thinner plastic bags
Asahi Beer - less aluminum in beer cans
Nissin Foods - ramen cups from resin/paper
Ezaki Glico - thinner boxes
Suntory - less material in PET bottles
Morinaga Milk - thinner glass bottles
Nippon Ham - thinner film on sausages

Natural Cheese Production in Japan

Most of the milk produced in Japan ends up as milk and not other dairy products. Since the demand for milk has held steady or decreased in recent years, the major dairy companies are aiming to replace a good deal of the imported natural cheese with domestic natural cheese.

As a result, a number of large natural cheese factories have opened in the past year. The June 1st issue of the Hokkaido Shimbun gave some details on the new factories and new production capacity. The numbers below are given in tons of raw milk used yearly.

Meiji Dairies
200,000 tons
Snow Brand
200,000 tons
Morinaga Milk
150,000 tons

Previously domestic natural cheese production was very limited. Expect to see a large number of new cheese products in the coming months.

Supermarket Circulars in Japan

One more website which might be of interest to people looking for information on Japanese products, which was brought to my attention on the Japan Marketing News blog.

Japanese supermarket sales depend on supermarket circulars which come with daily newspapers. If you want to stick with the same product, but get it at the cheapest price, you are likely to have to keep up with the circulars and buy at a different store each week depending on where it is on sale.

I have read that this is why Walmart, through its Seiyu department stores in Japan, have not been able to get across the everyday low prices concept. Most Japanese shoppers, read housewives, still think about supermarket circulars first.

Here is a website where many of the supermarket circulars are reproduced.

Company Histories

There is one more website I would like to mention. Information in English on Japanese companies is getting a little bit easier to find than in the past, but is still not what it should be. I just came across a website called Funding Universe and for some reason they have a big list of company histories on the website.

Many Japanese company histories are included, but some are very much out of date. Nevertheless, it is an interesting place to start when you have struck out everywhere else.

Everything About Can Drinks

I mentioned an interesting blog yesterday, and today I would like to introduce a fascinating website devoted to can drinks in Japan, called Can Can Jiten (dictionary). I don't see any information about the author, but somebody has been going to the trouble since 1999 of recording all the information from the labels of all the canned drinks he or she can find. The result is a fairly amazing archive of data on almost 9,000 different drink cans. If you are interested in such things, you can spend hours on this site looking at the different products or the changes in a single product over time. Well done. I don't have that much free time or energy, but it is nice someone else does though.

Vending Machine Blog

There is a very eccentric and yet fascinating blog in Japanese about the daily changes made to a specific Japanese vending machine. Only the title of the blog is in Japanese, all the rest is shown through daily pictures of the vending machine. Most days there are no changes, but once every 10 days or so, certain drinks are replaced by new offerings. With this daily record, it is easy to see that these changes and the placement of the drinks is not random. Worth a look.

I first became aware of this blog through Neil Duckett's blog.