Beyond Meat is entering Japan through a new partnership with one of the country’s largest grocery store holding companies in United Super Market Holdings (USMH).
The new agreement, announced on Friday in Tokyo at the SKS Japan conference, is a distribution and product development deal through which USMH will have exclusive distribution rights of Beyond Meat branded products in Japan as well as the ability to use Beyond’s meat in new products developed for the Japanese market.
Products co-developed under the partnership will be sold under USMH’s Green Growers brand, a brand initially launched by the grocery chain to sell lettuce grown via the company’s vertical farm “plant factory” called TERRABASE. These products, the first of which will include Beyond’s minced plant-based ground beef, will also include Beyond’s branding on the products in something akin to a “powered by Beyond” style branding approach. Products developed under the Green Grower brand will be tailored to specific formats and tastes of the Japanese consumer.
The co-development partnership between USMH and Beyond will be done through a new open innovation initiative from USMH called “AKIBA-Runway”. USMH launched AKIBA-Runway in March of this year as a way to work with other companies to utilize their technologies to create new products for their customers.
For Beyond, the deal with USMH is the company’s second attempt to enter the Japanese market. The company’s first attempt was going to be through a partnership with investor Mitsui, which had invested in Beyond back in 2016. However, the two companies announced in 2018 that the plan to enter Japan had been shelved.
But now with USMH, the plant-based meat company will enter the market in partnership with a powerful grocery chain with deep knowledge of Japanese consumer preferences and tastes. USMH, which has over 500 retail outlets in Japan through its MaxValu, Maruetsu and Kasumi chains of stores, has a wide reach across Japan.
For USMH President and CEO Motohiro Fujita, the new deal delivers in part on a vision he discussed the last time he spoke at Smart Kitchen Summit Japan in 2019. At that event (SKS Japan is put on in partnership with The Spoon and SigmaXYZ), Fujita talked about how he wanted to disrupt the Japanese grocery store market through innovation. Fujita told The Spoon that this deal and innovations delivered through AKIBA-Runway are the results of that vision he outlined on stage in the summer of 2019.
