If you order a special box of Kobe beef patties from Asahiya, a family-owned meat shop in Takasago City, Hyogo Prefecture, western Japan, you'll likely have to wait 43 years for your order to arrive.
Yes, you read that right, the waiting time is 43 years.
Asahiya, founded in 1926, had been selling meat products from Hyogo Prefecture – including Kobe beef – for decades before adding its specialty beef patties to its line-up. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the patties became an internet sensation, leading to long waits for customers to get their hands on them.
CNN visited Asahiya in 2022 to meet Shigeru Nitta, the third-generation owner of the shop. At the time, customers who wanted to buy Asahiya's special beef patties only had to wait 30 years!
An unprofitable business idea
This highly coveted specialty beef patty is just one of four Kobe beef patties Asahiya sells. If you can’t wait nearly four decades for the special patty, you can try another of Asahiya’s premium beef patties. And they’ll only have to wait four years.
“We started selling our products through online sales sites in 1999,” Nitta said. “We sold special beef patties as a business experiment back then.”
Nitta grew up in Hyogo and visited local farms and attended beef auctions with his father as a child. He took over the store from his father in 1994, when he was just 30 years old.
After experimenting with e-commerce for a few years, Nitta realized that customers weren’t interested in paying a large sum of money for premium beef online. That’s when he made a bold decision. “We offered a special beef patty for just 270 yen ($1.80) per patty, considering that each patty of beef costs about 400 yen ($2.70),” Nitta said.
According to him, Asahiya made delicious beef patties at affordable prices, so that customers could enjoy premium meat and continue to buy in the future. In order to reduce financial costs, Asahiya initially only made and sold about 200 beef patties per week.
“We sell beef raised by people we know. Our store only sells meat produced in Hyogo Prefecture, whether it’s Kobe beef, Kobe pork or Tajima chicken. This has been the store’s signature style since before I became the owner,” Nitta said, adding that his grandfather used to cycle to Sanda, a famous Wagyu breeding area in Hyogo, to buy quality products.
Thanks to the dedication of the owners, Asahiya has good relationships with local beef producers and does not need to import goods from outside the prefecture.
Famous but the more you sell, the more you lose
Asahiya's beef patties have an interesting feature: the price is quite cheap while using high-quality ingredients. Each patty is made fresh daily and without preservatives. The ingredients include 3-year-old A5-grade female Kobe beef and potatoes sourced from a local farm. Nitta revealed that he encouraged the farm to use cow manure to grow potatoes. The potato stalks are then fed to the cows, creating a closed cycle.
Eventually, Nitta’s unique idea caught the attention of locals and the media. When news of Asahiya’s cakes made headlines in the early 2000s, people flocked to try them.
“We stopped selling the cakes in 2016, because the wait time was more than 14 years. We thought about stopping the supply, but we kept getting calls asking us to continue selling the cakes,” Nitta shared.
As of 2017, Asahiya continues to take orders for its special beef patties, but has had to raise the price to 500-540 yen ($3.40-$3.65) each. But since Kobe beef began being exported outside of Japan, the price of beef has doubled, so Asahiya still loses money on each patty produced.
The shop now produces 200 beef patties a day, up from once a week. “The beef patties are especially popular, much more so than our other products,” Nitta says with a laugh, referring to the ironic fact that the product is costing him money.
“We were advised to hire more workers to sell more cakes. But I don’t think any shop owner wants to hire more workers and produce more cakes only to see themselves lose more… I feel sorry for making customers wait. I really want to make cakes faster and send them out as soon as possible. But if I do that, the shop will go bankrupt,” he said.
Fortunately, Nitta said that about half of the people who tried the beef patty ordered more Kobe beef, which showed that his marketing strategy was on point.
The shop owner's goal
Each box of the special beef buns, which usually comes in five pieces, is currently selling for 2,700 yen ($18.20).
The store regularly texts customers in line to update them on the latest estimated shipping cost. About a week before the delivery date, the store confirms with customers again. “Some people have changed their email address. For those people, we call them directly and let them know the delivery date,” Nitta explains.
Customers who are in line to receive their beef patties today actually placed their orders about 10 years ago. As of January 2024, there are 63,000 people waiting for delivery, according to information provided by CNN.
Having to fulfill unprofitable orders for more than 40 years can present certain problems, especially as Kobe beef and labor costs continue to rise. But these challenges do not discourage Nitta.
“When I started selling pies online, I got a lot of orders from remote islands. Most of them had heard about Kobe beef on TV, but had never had it because they had to go to the city to try it. I realized that there were a lot of people who had never had Kobe beef,” Nitta said. “For that reason, I kept selling beef pies and got more orders. That's why I didn't really care about losing money.”
By selling more buns and helping more people enjoy Kobe beef, Nitta hopes to boost the local meat business.
TB (according to Vietnam+)Source
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