Umeshu thats Delicious to the Last Drop

For 11 consecutive years, we’ve seen Japanese food-related exports increase. If we look at up to 2023, they reached JPY 1.45 trillion. Central to this success is the rising number of Japanese restaurants, tripling from 55,000 ten years ago to over 200,000 in 2023. How do you account for this substantial rise in Japanese food exports? Why is now the time for washoku to shine internationally?

Japan is rich in seafood due to our country being an island, and I think this is a huge factor contributing to Japanese cuisine. The popularity of Japanese food started with sushi, a dish that relies heavily on quality seafood. The origin point of this washoku boom was the US, spreading the word about sushi all around the country. As a result, there are many authentic sushi bars and Japanese restaurants in the US. I think this fact proves that sushi is the driving force.

In recent years, ramen has also become popular in foreign countries; however, ramen traces its origins back to China. Ramen is exported from China to Japan, meaning ramen is a secondary factor. I’m not exactly sure why ramen noodles are so popular in foreign countries.

Japanese ume cultivation goes back thousands of years, with the umes being selectively bred over the years. Your company’s mission is to spread the taste of umes around the world. While sake is known worldwide, umeshu isn’t as well known. Could you explain to us what makes umeshu so unique?

CHOYA switched from wine production to umeshu production around the time my grandfather oversaw the company. He felt that Japanese wine could simply not compete with wines from leading wine-producing countries like France, Italy, and Spain. When he retired at the age of 60, he told his three sons to develop more promising products, ensuring that CHOYA Umeshu's dream would live. Each son tried for about 30 years to develop promising products, and finally, umeshu was decided upon. It was then, around the late 1980s, that CHOYA’s main business came to the forefront.

In addition to umeshu, there are two types of alcoholic beverages in Japan: authentic sake and shochu, which is distilled  spirits. As you might have alluded to, sake is very popular in foreign countries, and the product is a symbol of the culture of rice, which is very important in Asian countries. It is my opinion that Japanese alcoholic beverages derived from rice are the final form of this tradition.

Ume trees were originally imported from China, but the fruit specifically has been cultivated and nurtured by the people of Japan. As a result, in China, there are only about ten varieties of ume trees (I hear that the currently increased varieties were brought from Japan), but in Japan, there are more than 270 varieties of ume trees. This is the result of the tireless efforts of the Japanese people to diversify the breeding of these trees. Japanese people felt that ume seeds were good part of fruit to have, and in Japanese culture, people eat ume fruit, including seeds.

When making ume-boshi(salted ume pickles), we place salt on the ume fruits to extract the juice before they dry under direct sunlight. When we finally consume the ume juice, we can taste all the good ingredients. When making umeshu, the ingredients are extracted from the seeds, so you are eating the whole ume. We want to make the name CHOYA synonymous with umeshu, so much so that people no longer say umeshu. Rather, they will say CHOYA when talking about umeshu. I want to make our products the final evolution of umeshu. Cointreau and Grand Marnier have taken the same approach, and basically, these are the final evolutions of those products. We want CHOYA to represent the pinnacle of umeshu, becoming the proper noun used when talking about umeshu.

CHOYA Premium Umeshu

What are some of the key strategies or initiatives you are taking to become the name synonymous with umeshu?

My target is ethnic groups, and we are expanding our products to certain races that haven’t traditionally purchased umeshu in the past. Asians like Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Koreans already know about umeshu, so we hope that by targeting those, we can expand to other markets such as the US and Europe.

Honestly speaking, when asked in Western markets what umeshu is, I have a little difficulty explaining. Some people in Western countries do not know about umes, and if they do, they have never thought about making liqueur from them. Today, I am using the word 'ume' instead of 'plum, but there are differences, and Japanese ume is closer to apricots than plums. I want to take the eagerness of Chinese and South Korean people towards umeshu and introduce it to other countries. Instead of using the power of 100 million Japanese people, I want to instead use the power of 1.5 billion Chinese people since this would be much more impactful.

Jewish people are starting to know about our brand, and our products are now sold in supermarkets in Poland. We are expanding our presence step by step.

2024 was a huge year for inbound tourism, with Japan expecting around 37 million by the end of the year. These people are spending approximately JPY 7 trillion, with many taking advantage of the weak JPY versus the USD to purchase unique Japanese products to take home with them as souvenirs. You have your bar in Ginza as well as your new Ume Experience in Kamakura. What sort of impact is the record number of tourists having on your business?

Many foreign tourists are visiting our Ume Taiken workshop in Kyoto and Kamakura, and I think this is a good point for our business. The target of our bars and the Ume Taiken workshop is actually Japanese people. We opened CHOYA bar in Hong Kong this September. In the future, we would like to set up a bar even in New York or London, so that we can target customers in their locality.

When inbound tourists buy our products, there are good and bad points. When those tourists purchase in Japan, they can get our products for a cheaper price, but when they purchase in their own countries, the price will be higher. This will mean that they won’t buy our products in their own countries. In Japan, we can provide a wider range of our products.

Your website and Ginza bar not only focus on drinks and cocktails but also on food. When interviewing the firm Marukome, they mentioned the idea of introducing their products through local chefs who create fusion dishes that incorporate their products. Looking at your company, is this an approach you might consider as a way of introducing your products in new markets?

We have already started collaborations with local food industries. In a bar we work with in Hong Kong, we provide pairings for Cantonese food.

The Ginza Bar

You mentioned London as a location to provide ume-based cocktails. Moving forward, are you looking for any international partnerships or collaborations to bring your drinks to global markets?

This is a very difficult point for me to answer currently. We are currently working with a PR company in London, which is designed to find collaborative partners in London. This means that we are currently looking for more touch points in the market. By using the feedback we’ve received, we are now looking for the ideal direction to move forward.

With Japan’s current demographic decline, one industry that will inevitably be impacted is the farming industry. The average age in the sector is over 65 years old, and while this is leading to production problems, there is also an issue with skill inheritance, with many skilled workers retiring without passing on their knowledge to the next generation. How is this challenge impacting your company, and what sort of strategies are you putting in place to make sure valuable skills and knowledge are passed down to the next generation?

Fortunately, with the umeshu culture present in Japan, many younger people are aware of our products. The biggest challenge is then communicating our virtues to those younger people. There is demand for our products from young Japanese people, but the biggest point for us is how to increase that demand. While sales are increasing thanks to the efforts of our employees, we shouldn’t be satisfied with just steady progress. We need to challenge ourselves, even if this means failure because even in failure, we can learn important lessons.

The keywords for our products are quality, quantity, and aging. This is the base of our business, and we need to pursue those keywords humbly. However, strictly following these keywords will stifle innovation, so I encourage our employees to sometimes stick their necks out and try new or exciting things.

Have you ever tried to link your products to festive activities? In the West, many alcohol producers will link certain products to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Could this be something you could pursue with Choya Umeshu?

We tried selling ume chocolates on Valentine’s Day, but we were not successful. I would like to try connecting Western events to our products once again; however, every attempt so far has not been successful. One successful attempt was the establishment of Umeshu Day, so in the future, I would like to establish a Choya Day. I would also like to promote more events, such as Halloween, which is becoming more popular in Japan.

Imagine that we come back on the very last day of your presidency and have this interview again. What would you like your tenure as the company’s president to be remembered by as you hand the company over to the next generation of CHOYA Umeshu executives?

I would like to train my successors to believe in their employees and teach them how to find the correct path for business. For example, we are currently selling non-alcoholic drinks and the sale of such drinks started in 1998. For the first 15 years of sales, many employees were against the idea of selling non-alcoholic drinks, but now, non-alcoholic drinks alone account for 25% of our sales. In this case, I broke the conventional narrow view because I believed deeply in the product, and this is something I would like to pass on to my successor: to not be afraid to break the rules if you really believe in something deeply.

For more information, please visit their website at: https://www.choya.co.jp/en/