A Juice Brand Meant to Help Farmers in Japan
This small juice brand crowdfunded on Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake
They make 100% fresh juice made from wasted fruit
It’s a DTC brand started and operated by a Gen-Z team
I love Japanese fruits - they’re beautiful, well taken care of, and sweet beyond words.
Unfortunately, a lot of it goes to waste, largely due to the Japanese consumer market’s high demand for visual perfection.
While many are trying to change this, I found out about a small company looking to make fresh juice out of these wasted fruits.
The Fruits Company was started by a young Gen-Z team looking to help farmers who face a large portion of their crop being unsellable as well as tackle a little bit of the food loss problem.
Things like purpose-driven brands, CSR (corporate social responsibility), or SDGs (sustainable development goals) are still relatively new concepts in Japan. This isn’t to say companies are bad, they just haven’t buzzed in culture in the same way they have in other markets.
The Fruits Company ran a crowdfunding campaign on Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake, and blew past their goal rather quickly.
It’s a DTC brand, or direct-to-consumer, and they mainly sell online via their Shopify eCommerce site. They’ve also been doing a lot of pop-ups and in-store collaborations with various cafes and coffee shops.
Their grape juice, which I tried, was made with Japanese Kyoho grapes. If you saw my guide on Koshu, Yamanashi, the grape capital of Japan, you may know about them.
The juice was really good and incredibly sweet, and I’ve grown to like it the more I drink it. I’m not really a fan of artificially flavored grape juice, but this one tastes like the real fruit.
It comes in a 500ml glass bottle and is 100% real fruit juice. Only Vitamin C is occasionally added to help with the color.
I recently talked with one of co-founders, Ryohei Tokunaga, and you can see him speak about their company, what they want to do, and about his perspective on Japanese Gen-Z consumers in this video.