Beef back on Japanese menus
Bloomberg News Service
TOKYO — Kuniko Hosogi, a 32-year-old office worker, says she's regained her appetite for meat a year after fears about mad cow disease slashed Japanese sales.
Bloomberg News Service
"I'm now eating it as much as before," she said after lunch at a McDonald's in Tokyo's Marunouchi business district. "I even feel it's safer now as retailers are more careful about quality."
Customers try to choose from special offers at a McDonald's restaurant in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Meat safety campaigns and discounts are luring back Japanese consumers frightened away by mad cow disease.
Ranchers in Australia, the world's No. 1 beef exporter, say winning back Japanese consumers is key to whether cattle prices retrace their 36 percent drop since September. That's when Tokyo confirmed its first of five cases of mad cow disease and demand began to slide.
Japanese household consumption of beef tumbled 58 percent in October from August 2001 levels. It's gained a third since Jan. 1.
Meat safety campaigns and discounts are helping to persuade Japanese consumers to put beef back on their shopping lists.
In August, McDonald's, the biggest restaurant chain in Japan, slashed the price of a hamburger by more than a quarter to 59 yen (50 cents) at most of its outlets.
So far, Japan's own cattle producers have gained the most from improving consumer demand.
"Japanese beef is now so heavily subsidized by the government because of the (mad cow) problem that it's cheaper than imported beef, which is the reverse of the situation we'd always seen before," said Malcolm Foster, managing director of Rangers Valley Cattle, an Australian cattle-fattening farm owned by Marubeni Corp., Japan's fifth-biggest trading company.
