Japan Day 2: U.S. beef promotions

Our second day in Japan began with market briefings by USMEF and the U.S. Ag Trade Center office from the U.S. Embassy. After our meetings, the group visited with the corporate Lawson outlet office (second-largest convenience store chain in Japan) and toured a Lawson convenience store to observe the U.S. beef promotion with the “bento” boxes. Bento’s are a microwavable lunch box and these specific kinds in Lawson carry the U.S. beef “We Care” program marketing.

It seems Lawson is targeting young, working men who enjoy beef because they need a high energy, nutritious diet. This is good and will hopefully trickle over their families for more beef consumption.

The team then toured three different grocery stores that carried U.S. beef and were doing a promotion with USMEF and the “We Care” marketing. These grocery stores were very clean and had more choices than U.S. grocery stores in their meat department.

What was awesome to see were moms feeding their children the samples of U.S. beef. That really showed they trusted the safe beef, if they were willing to feed it to their children!

Some other interested things we saw in the grocery stores:

A video of the farmers where the Japanese beef came from:

Look at the price of this cantaloupe – 15,750 yen which is around $200! Similar pricing to these watermelon.

You can view more pictures on the NCB online photo album here.