Lamb gains cheap image in Japan

Press, 23 August 1984, Page 2

Lamb gains cheap image in Japan

From

BRUCE ROSCOE

in Tokyo While the Meat Board is spending heavily in Japan to promote lamb as a quality meat, Japanese restaurants, supermarkets, and traders are promoting it as a cheap meat. The chairman of the Meat Board, Mr Adam Begg, in his calls on Japanese companies in Tokyo this week is being told that lamb sales prospects are looking bright. These companies are right, but they are not right for the right reasons. This contradiction — goods which are inexpensive in Japan are always regarded as of poor quality — is likely to prolong lamb’s confused status as a meat in no-man’s-land. Japanese business and general-readership newspapers, however, are catching on to the more powerful image projections of cheapness sent out by retailers. The board will find reversing this process difficult when its investment advertising, though perhaps high by New Zealand marketing standards, touches only the numerical equivalent of Japanese hamlets. In a lamb survey by the influential Japanese financial daily, “Nihon Keizai Shimbun,” lamb’s recent popularity was several times attributed to its low cost. Another mass-circulation newspaper, reporting on the decision by Zenchiku Company, Ltd, to trade more in

lamb, said the company had chosen lamb because it was “half the price of beef.” The interesting thing about such newspaper accounts is that, in spite ol years of. a Meat Board presence in Japan, Japanese reporters invariably still feel the need first to explain to readers what lamb is. One article contains the description, “Lamb is the meat of sheep less than a year old. Mutton is used for ham and sausage processing. The quality of lamb and mutton is totally different.” Another says, “Lamb is the meat of sheep aged between six and 10 months. It is different from mutton, smelling little.” The first Japanese chain restaurant to focus on lamb was Denny’s, according to “Nihon Keizai.” Denny’s, a suburban chain that caters to low-budget families, put a lamb-chop dish on its menu in 1980. At Denny’s, a meal of 140 g of lamb costs $7.30. A Denny’s lamb hamburger is priced at $5.60. "Lamb is selling well because it is cheap. It is popular particularly among young people, who are preferring lamb to pork,” a Denny’s manager said. Most newspapers say the retail price of New Zealand lamb varies from $1.25 to $1.50 per IOOg. “Nihon Keizai” said that though young people felt no resistance to lamb, middleaged and older people did. They say, “Lamb is cheap, but it smells,” the newspaper said.

Frozen lamb shipped to Japan often is defrosted for processing after arrival, then refrozen. Japanese say the smell is caused by oxidisation of the fat when lamb is frozen, then defrosted unnaturally, with running water, for example, causing the oxidised fat to emit a grassy-lamb odour. Defrosting the produce twice rapidly, often to save processing and preparation time, doubles the smell. Chilled lamb is seen as the answer to the odour. New Zealand and Australian shipments of chilled lamb are arriving in Japan about once each two weeks, and big supermarkets are keen to stock it, says “Nihon Keizai.” The Seiyu supermarket chain, one of Japan’s largest and a lamb customer for about 15 years, has set up a “lamb corner” that runs video tapes explaining how to prepare chilled lamb dishes. Itoyokado, another supermarket chain, last month ordered 12 stores to stock chilled lamb and increase sales space for the meat. An Itoyokado manager was quoted as saying, "There is no rise in pork and chicken sales. Excepting beef, lamb is the only meat with sales growth prospects.” The Zenchiku Company believes it can put lamb across best by encouraging consumers to douse it in a wine-based sauce. It has jointly developed the sauce with Momoya Company, Ltd, a small Tokyo food firm.