It’s all about increasing the value of the crops, livestock and ag products grown and produced right here in Indiana—and expanding the international markets for those products. That’s why one of Indiana’s top ag leaders was part of a delegation last week on a trade mission to Japan.
“We send a lot of ag products to Japan. A good part of that also comes out of Indiana, so it’s a great relationship to maintain,” says Don Lamb, Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA), who just returned from a USDA trade mission to Tokyo and Osaka, Japan.
Japan is Indiana’s third largest agricultural export market after Canada and Mexico, which is why Lamb said it was important to meet face-to-face with Japanese business leaders—including the president of one Japanese company who purchases some of their ingredients from Indiana that are used to manufacture their food products.
“There is a company in Japan called Kewpie that is a really big processor of mayonnaise. There’s also an Indiana company that has a good connection with Kewpie and will send eggs to their company to be made into mayonnaise, so the reality of those relationships was brought home to me,” says Lamb. “When you have an opportunity to shake the hand and get to know the president of the company that’s using Indiana products, I’d say that was the highlight of the trip was to make that kind of a connection.”
Lamb says he also learned more about marketing Indiana’s food products to Japanese consumers.
“They go to the grocery store three to four times a week and buy small quantities of things because they have fewer people in a household,” according to Lamb. “They don’t have a lot of room for storage. They don’t have deep freezers like we have, so they buy things a lot more day-to-day. Their packaging is completely different. Smaller packages are important to them. High quality is very important to them. They’re very much a quality-driven market over a price-driven market. Learning those specifics about how you need to sell to a country like Japan was also a really eye-opening piece of that for me.”
He says the trade mission also involved promoting specialty crops, as well as wines, spirits, and other ag products.
“Many of those meetings that took place were with smaller producers that were able to make a connection to send their product from a farm—like in Indiana—straight to Japan,” says Lamb. “Again, they’re focused on quality and relationships. It’s not uncommon for what we might think is a small producer to export products to a country like Japan.”
The trade mission was led by Alexis Taylor, USDA Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs. Lamb was joined on the trip by ISDA’s International Trade Director Drew Sherman.
Lamb adds that he’ll be pushing more of Indiana’s producers and ag businesses to join future trade missions to other countries.
“The next time we go on a trade mission, I would be interested to find producers here in Indiana that would like to go with us,” says Lamb. “That was one thing that we could do better than what we did on this trip—to be able to take a few companies with us that are interested in exporting. The USDA can help set meetings up and help connect buyers to those producers.”
Click below to hear C.J. Miller’s radio news report for Hoosier Ag Today.
