The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) recently published the results of its Diet and Lifestyle Survey 2023, conducted annually via its Nippon Food Shift campaign on around 4,000 participants to understand local consumption behaviour.
“One key finding from this year’s results has been that product affordability is very important to local consumers now,” MAFF stated via a formal statement.
“When it comes to everyday shopping and food purchasing, consumers across most age groups highlighted that the most important factor to them is the ‘lowest possible price’ when comparing similar products.
“The total proportion of consumers highlighting this as their highest priority was 44.1% overall – this was particularly prominent (50%) amongst men between the age of 65 to 74.”
Behind affordability, the next major purchasing driver for food was found to be local origins, where 32.5% of all surveyed consumers highlighted this to be their main motivation.
“This was more so for fresh products, where 60% of consumers said they would choose domestically produced fresh items such as rice, vegetables, meat and fish wherever possible.
“But even for non-fresh, processed foods, over 50% of all respondents also said that they preferred to buy local products.”
Participants were also surveyed on the most severe agri-food issues currently facing the country, and the majority identified food waste and food security as the most pressing challenge for the food industry.
“Japanese consumers are aware that the top two food industry challenges Japan is facing are to reduce food waste (39.7%) and to improve food self-sufficiency (38.1%),” said the ministry.
“Most of them (38.0%) are also aware that most of our agriculture workers are ageing, and the labour supply for this industry is in decline.
“That said, some new concerns this year that has crept into the top list of concerns has been the price increases of food products, which came in fourth at 35.9%; as well as increasing production costs due to the rising prices of energy and materials which came in seventh at 23.6%.”
Major media of influence
Food manufacturing firms would do well to spread out marketing dollars across various mediums if the aim is to capture a wide audience of consumers in Japan, as the survey also found that the influence of different media still varies widely for different age groups.
“The older the age group, the higher the preference we found for television and newspapers to get their ‘food-related news and information to consider when shopping’, across both men and women. Television continues to be the most common form of traditional media at over 60%,” MAFF said.
“But the media of choice differs even within younger age groups – those aged 35 and over tend to prefer news sites to obtain their food information, whereas younger consumers tend to look to social media platforms such as X or Facebook for this.”
