Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – If you order a box of frozen croquettes made from Kobe beef from Asahiya, a family-run butchery in the western Japanese city of Takasago, it will take 43 years before you get your order.
AndFounded in 1926, Asahiya Butchery sold meat products from Hyogo Prefecture, including Kobe beef, for decades before adding beef croquettes to shelves in the years after World War II.
But it wasn’t until the early 2000s that these fried potato and beef dumplings became an online sensation, and that has now resulted in a long wait for buyers.
This croquette dish is highly sought after in Japan. Credit: Asahiya
CNN spoke with Shigeru Nitta, a third-generation owner of Asahiya, in 2022.
At that time, the waiting period for these delicious croquettes was only 30 years.
Unprofitable business idea
The highly sought-after Extreme Croquettes are one of 4 types of Kobe beef croquettes available at Asahiya Butchery.
And if you can’t wait four decades, the store currently offers another variety called “Premier Kobe Beef Croquettes.”
You will only have to wait to eat this type of food for 4 years.
“We started selling our products through e-marketing in 1999. Back then, we introduced Extreme Croquettes as an experiment,” Nita said.
Nitta grew up in Hyogo, visiting local farms and beef auctions with his father from a young age.
He took over management of the store from his father in 1994 when he was 30 years old.
A closer look at Kobe beef. Credit: Asahiya
After experimenting with e-commerce for a few years, Nita realized that customers were reluctant to pay a lot for premium beef online, and this encouraged him to make a bold decision.
“We created delicious, affordable croquettes that explained our store concept as a strategy to get customers to enjoy the croquettes in the hopes that they would buy Kobe beef after trying them for the first time,” he explained.
To limit financial loss at first, Asahiya Butchery only produced 200 croquettes in its own kitchen next to its shop every week.
Enhance production and increase popularity
This meal is prepared without preservatives. Credit: Asahiya
This meal is prepared fresh daily without preservatives.
Their ingredients include 3-year-old Kobe beef, graded A5, as well as potatoes sourced from a local farm.
Nita said he encouraged the farm to use cow dung to grow potatoes, and then the cows were fed the potato stalks, creating a cycle.
Eventually, his unique concept caught the attention of local residents and the media.
When Asahiya croquettes were reported in the early 2000s, their popularity skyrocketed.
“We stopped selling them in 2016 because ~ the waiting period exceeded 14 years,” Nita explained. “We thought about stopping orders, but we received many calls asking to continue offering them.”
The Asahiya Butchery resumed accepting orders for croquettes in 2017, but raised the price. The company also increased production, jumping from two hundred pieces of croquettes per week to two hundred pieces per day.
A man on a mission
Each box of Extreme Croquettes, which contains 5 croquettes, is priced at 2,700 yen ($18.20).
There are 63,000 people currently on the waiting list as of January 2024.
Having a 40-plus waiting list of unprofitable orders to fill can be stressful, especially as Kobe beef prices and labor costs continue to rise.
But there is something more important that encourages Nita to continue. “When I started selling croquettes online, I received many orders from remote, isolated islands, where the majority of the population had heard about Kobe beef on television, but had never had it,” he noted. “They had to go to the cities if they wanted to try it. I realized there were a lot of people who had never eaten Kobe beef.”
“That’s why I kept offering the croquettes as an experiment, and getting more orders for Kobe beef if they liked it. That’s why I started it in the first place, so I didn’t really care if it wasn’t profitable,” he added.
2024-01-24 07:15:38
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