Import
Getting a food ingredient into Japan
If you make a food ingredient and would like it sold in Japan, we would be glad to hear from you. Researching the market here and building the sales is our side of the work — we take a product from the first conversation through to delivery to manufacturers in Japan.
Categories
What we handle
- Dairy products
- Plant proteins
- Functional food ingredients
- Other categories on request
Scope
What we do
- Researching the Japanese market for your product — where it fits, who buys it and at what price
- Confirming conformity with the Japanese food regulations that apply to it
- Import clearance, domestic storage and logistics
- Selling and delivering to our customers in Japan
Context
Why Japan is difficult
Japanese food manufacturers are not hard to sell to because their quality bar is higher than yours. They are hard to sell to because the material is not the only thing they are buying.
The barrier is not only language
Japan has spent a long time developing a culture of its own, and its business customs and its regulations came out of that culture. What a buyer here expects of a supplier, and what the rules ask of a product, both differ from the market you know — and neither is written down anywhere you can easily read.
Consistency is valued above price
A buyer here will not move for a few per cent if it puts lot-to-lot consistency at risk. What they are paying for is the ability to run the same process next month without adjusting it.
The first non-conformity is not read as an isolated incident
It is read as evidence about how your plant is run. Recovering a Japanese account afterwards is slow, and frequently it is not recovered at all. This is the most common way an otherwise promising supply relationship ends here.
Qualification takes longer than you expect
Samples, internal testing, a documentation review of your facility, then a trial lot before anything commercial. Months rather than weeks.
This is the part we take on. Bringing imported food into Japan is our trade, and we have done it before — tell us what you make, and let us do the work at this end.
If you are considering the Japanese market, we would like to hear what you make.