HAWAI'I'S SMALL BUSINESS
Tofu maker refused to get mashed
By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer
The heads of Hawai'i's tofu families from three different islands gathered for a hasty meeting on O'ahu in 1999 to discuss a crisis in their business.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
A study by the Honolulu-based Pacific Health Research Institute, as outlined at a conference in Washington, had linked advanced brain aging to eating soybean curd, causing local tofu sales to plummet by as much as 80 percent and stay there during the normally busy holiday shopping season.
With ads, letters to the editor and spots on talk shows, Paul Uyehara fought back to defend tofu as healthy food.
Hawai'i's 13 tofu businesses at the time were mostly run by elderly people from longtime Japanese-American families who were comfortable waking in the dark and working long hours.
Most of them were unfamiliar with the concept of "crisis management" to deal with the assault on their industry. And they certainly had no public relations budgets or any experience dealing with Honolulu's news media.
"We were actually quite naive," said Paul Uyehara, president of Aloha Tofu Factory, a small business based in the Palama area. "The people who work in tofu are more traditional. They want to do their work, get things done and go home. This was just a huge distraction that people didn't know how to deal with."
What happened to Hawai'i's tofu industry in 1999 — when public perception turned on a single product — was a rarity for small businesses in Hawai'i, said Andy Poepoe, district director for the Small Business Administration.
But when it does happen, there are a number of steps a business can take to minimize the impact.
Ruth Ann Becker, president of Becker Communications Inc., a Honolulu public relations firm, believes that businesses should first honestly evaluate what's being said about them or their products.
"You need to decide whether the negative publicity is well founded, first of all," Becker said. "If yes, then you address it: Are there things I can change? If they're unfounded and it's negative publicity, you have to address that quickly and very publicly.
"Avoiding the issue is never a good response. You do need a person who the media can go to for information and can speak up for the product."
The business can try to diversify into other products or sell the main product to a new market, said the SBA's Poepoe. "We might try to get them to distribute to other areas," Poepoe said.
Many of the tofu-factory families wanted to simply ride out the bad publicity. Others talked about suing somebody, anybody.
Uyehara, now 37, was one of the youngest participants in the 1999 meeting and led the effort to fight back.
"We had our profits wiped out for that year," Uyehara said. "It basically killed us, to put it lightly."
The families pooled their money to buy a $10,000 television ad campaign that paired celebrity chefs with doctors and dieticians, who all emphasized the benefits of tofu.
The commercial campaign ran over three months but had little effect on sales.
"Nobody saw it," Uyehara said. "As small-business men, we don't have a lot of experience and exposure to advertising, especially television advertising. It might not have been the best value for our money but at least it was something. Instead of just sitting back and doing nothing, we tried to do something."
Uyehara pored over tofu research on the Internet and found study after study extolling the benefits of tofu and soy. He also got in contact with Mainland tofu trade associations to solicit support for the Hawai'i industry. But Uyehara said the Mainland groups were afraid their involvement would spread the Hawai'i publicity to the rest of the country.
At the same time, Hawai'i's tofu market changed.
Many longtime, elderly customers who were fiercely loyal to particular brands stopped buying. And younger customers chose Mainland tofu because it cost less.
Then in April 2000, just as local sales began crawling back, the Pacific Health Research Institute study was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, leading to a new round of publicity.
Sales took a sudden 25 percent drop but Uyehara stepped in quickly, writing letters to the editor of local newspapers and appearing on talk radio.
It was the kind of advice that Becker recommends for businesses in similar situations. And within weeks, sales bounced back.
"It wasn't as severe the second time," Uyehara said. "I guess logic took over. People had time to think about it and say, 'We don't see a lot of demented people in China and Korea where they've been eating tofu for millennia.' "
Dr. Lon White, whose research touched off the drop in tofu sales in 1999, said yesterday that no study has been able to replicate his findings. That's in part because his study was based on data covering three decades and it would take an equal amount of time to replicate. White said he is left with a study that can neither be proved nor disproved easily. "Nothing should be accepted until it is supported from two or three sources," White said.
Looking back, Uyehara believes that the heads of Hawai'i's tofu industry could have done more to stop the original damage and drop in sales. He believes that someone from the industry should have spoken for the whole industry, armed with facts and figures.
It's among the hard lessons that Uyehara learned but may never have to apply, which would make him happy.
But he thinks about the experience of 1999 and 2000. And today, the memories are still raw.
Sales never totally recovered and are still down about 20 percent. But six days a week, Uyehara still shows up for work at 3 a.m. and ends his day 15 hours later.
It's a hard life that — as Uyehara and the other tofu families learned — can get can even tougher at times.
"I'm 37," Uyehara said. "But make tofu, you grow old fast."
Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.
