In my own layman’s way, I think about the challenges of Japanese agriculture, but the biggest problem is that it is not DXed. Farmers receive only 20% of the sales price when they wholesale to distributors. But with “Eat Choku,” they get about 80% of the selling price. However, farmers are not good at IT, so this is still a bottleneck. In other words, farmers need to be good at IT to survive. Mr. Akimoto is going around and educating farmers with a burning passion.

I have high expectations for “Eat Choku” to help Japanese agriculture compete not only domestically but also internationally.

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Talked dialogue with the founder of “Eat Choku” on how primary industry x IT can solve social issues. (Part 1)

Rina Akimoto, Representative of “Eat Choku” x Jun Fukuda, Brand Consultant

Akimoto: “(On tips for service development) It’s the reception of service and the acquisition of new customers. In terms of these two points, the message to new customers is to appeal to the producer, not the product. If you just say, “Delicious tomatoes” or “Delicious oysters,” they can be bought at other online supermarkets as well, right? Therefore, we focused on the producer’s passion and commitment on the page, and also on the media.

As you can see on the top page of the site, we actually put “user submissions” at the top, instead of “products”. According to the web theory of “put the items with conversion (the final result that can be obtained on an e-commerce site) on the top as much as possible,” it is absolutely better to put products on the top, but we put “posts from users” on the top with the intention of putting them there. This is because customers don’t read detailed descriptions when they visit a site, and they rarely read about pages. If the site is just a list of products, the customer will probably end up thinking, “It’s just an e-commerce site,” when he or she understands the site based on a quick glance. But if you put the user posts and the producer community at the top, people will intuitively understand that it is a site to connect with each other.

Editing and composition: Junko Io

Photo by Wataru Mukai

Date: July 1, 2021