See the original article in Japanese How many business people care about the nutritional balance of their diet? For busy professionals, maintaining a balanced diet can be especially tough to manage during work days. Chisan is a delicatessen delivery company in Japan. It has operated a deli delivery service called Okan, targeting single businessmen who live alone [1]. The company started a new service on November 25 called ‘Office Okan’, delivering additive-free Japanese deli to offices. It is currently accepting corporate users applications for its closed beta version. Okan is a service that regularly delivers Japanese deli to a registered addresses. Since the B2C service was launched on March 26 this year, approximately 200 users have subscribed to the service. The new service, Office Okan, caters to corporate users. With Office Okan, corporate customers will receive Japanese deli once a month, since the deli lasts about a month. The package contains 15 kinds of Japanese home-style deli, including “simmered mackerel in miso” and “simmered meat and potatoes”. Brown rice, which lasts about a month, is also available as an additional order. These can be refrigerated, and users can prepare the meal in about minutes. The company’s CEO, Keita Swaki, says…
How many business people care about the nutritional balance of their diet? For busy professionals, maintaining a balanced diet can be especially tough to manage during work days.
Chisan is a delicatessen delivery company in Japan. It has operated a deli delivery service called Okan, targeting single businessmen who live alone [1]. The company started a new service on November 25 called ‘Office Okan’, delivering additive-free Japanese deli to offices. It is currently accepting corporate users applications for its closed beta version.
Okan is a service that regularly delivers Japanese deli to a registered addresses. Since the B2C service was launched on March 26 this year, approximately 200 users have subscribed to the service. The new service, Office Okan, caters to corporate users.
With Office Okan, corporate customers will receive Japanese deli once a month, since the deli lasts about a month. The package contains 15 kinds of Japanese home-style deli, including “simmered mackerel in miso” and “simmered meat and potatoes”. Brown rice, which lasts about a month, is also available as an additional order. These can be refrigerated, and users can prepare the meal in about minutes.
The company’s CEO, Keita Swaki, says the service can replace lunch, dinner, and even in-between snacks with healthy Japanese deli. Chisan aims to provide opportunities to ensure a well-balanced diet, giving business people an easy way to manage it.
We use the word ‘deli’ as a loose translation here, as the foods included can include meat, fish, beans, vegetables, and more. You can browse the kinds of foods on the Okan.jp site. ↩
We have previously discussed Tokyo-based startup MakeLeaps, which offers an online quotes and invoicing solution for freelancers and businesses in Japan. Today the company announced a third service to its repertoire of offerings, rolling out the capability to create delivery slips from its system as well. This is the most requested feature that they receive from their customers, they say. These slips are important notifications used very heavily in Japan to confirm the delivery of purchased electronic goods and services. If you’ve never had to manage delivery slips (like me!), the significance of this offering was not immediately obvious. But I had a chance to browse some of the feedback from their customers, and it looks like this feature can significantly save them time and manual effort in their day-to-day workflow. Bringing management of quotes, invoices, and delivery slips together under its platform, MakeLeaps is centralizing document management for freelancers and businesses. According to its announcement, the company had been providing this delivery slip feature to a group of beta testers, obtaining feedback from those users so they could refine and improve it before today’s official launch. Back in June MakeLeaps announced that it had surpassed 10,000 business users. They’re…
We have previously discussed Tokyo-based startup MakeLeaps, which offers an online quotes and invoicing solution for freelancers and businesses in Japan. Today the company announced a third service to its repertoire of offerings, rolling out the capability to create delivery slips from its system as well. This is the most requested feature that they receive from their customers, they say.
These slips are important notifications used very heavily in Japan to confirm the delivery of purchased electronic goods and services. If you’ve never had to manage delivery slips (like me!), the significance of this offering was not immediately obvious.
But I had a chance to browse some of the feedback from their customers, and it looks like this feature can significantly save them time and manual effort in their day-to-day workflow.
Bringing management of quotes, invoices, and delivery slips together under its platform, MakeLeaps is centralizing document management for freelancers and businesses. According to its announcement, the company had been providing this delivery slip feature to a group of beta testers, obtaining feedback from those users so they could refine and improve it before today’s official launch.
Back in June MakeLeaps announced that it had surpassed 10,000 business users. They’re aiming to grow that to 25,000 companies by July of 2014.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Hachimenroppi (named after the eight faces and six arms seen on many Buddhist statues) is a startup that does something rather unusual. It delivers fish, handling distribution services for restaurants. And apparently that business has some serious potential, as the company announced recently that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from VC firm Value Create, PR agency Vector, and logistics company Winroader. The startup’s founder and CEO Masanari Matsuda has had a unique career since he started working in the banking industry, moving on to a VC firm, and then launching two companies prior to this one. He launched this startup back in September of 2010 when he thought there was great potential in evolving fish distribution. The company buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese izakaya restaurants or diners, according to their specific needs. The fish products industry in Japan has an annual volume of 3 trillion yen ($30.9 billion), and the startup expects to meet the demands of 300 billion yen ($3.09 billion) by the year of 2020, accounting for a 10% market share. Every single restraurant has a different need…
Tokyo-based Hachimenroppi (named after the eight faces and six arms seen on many Buddhist statues) is a startup that does something rather unusual. It delivers fish, handling distribution services for restaurants. And apparently that business has some serious potential, as the company announced recently that it has raised 150 million yen (approximately $1.5 million) from VC firm Value Create, PR agency Vector, and logistics company Winroader.
The startup’s founder and CEO Masanari Matsuda has had a unique career since he started working in the banking industry, moving on to a VC firm, and then launching two companies prior to this one. He launched this startup back in September of 2010 when he thought there was great potential in evolving fish distribution.
The company buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese izakaya restaurants or diners, according to their specific needs. The fish products industry in Japan has an annual volume of 3 trillion yen ($30.9 billion), and the startup expects to meet the demands of 300 billion yen ($3.09 billion) by the year of 2020, accounting for a 10% market share.
Every single restraurant has a different need regarding what kind of fish or how many fish are needed day to day. On the other hand, what fish are available very much depends on changing [environmental] conditions. So matching the needs of restaurants with supplies from the market can be compared to doing a huge jigsaw puzzle. We facilitate this by making the most of digital technologies.
From an outsider’s perspective, the fish distribution business is fiercely competitive because of the abundance of Japanese izakaya restaurant chains. But according to Matsuda, this intense competition is happening only in the area inside Tokyo’s Yamanote loopline (the center of Tokyo), and the whole distribution system works based on supply in the rest of the country. He added:
When we get an order from restaurants, we’ll not be able to refuse their orders because there was a poor catch. A direct delivery from ports is good in providing fresh fish to restaurants, but it’s not good at all times because a poor catch directly results in unavailable dishes on their menus. We can understand the needs of restaurants and propose alternative options to them. This is our value.
Hachimenroppi’s app for restaurant chefs and cooks
In order to do this the startup’s employees periodically visit restaurants/clients to establish better communications with their chefs. Interestingly, no specific personnel is assigned to each client, but any updates about restaurants collected by the employees are shared within their startup using Evernote. This means that any of their employees can visit clients, translating into greater potential for their business scalability.
Matsuda thinks that delivering top quality fish to consumers is their duty. With these new funds raised, they plan to develop a system that proposes fish recipes to chefs or cooks using smart tablets.
Instead of removing middlemen from the distribution process, which typical discount retailers often do, the company attempts to evolve the entire industry using digital solutions. If their service helps consumers eat better quality fish and if it helps fishermen earn more, it should certainly boost the fishing industry as a whole.
Similar to Hachimenroppi, we’ve seen more than a few Japanese startups trying to evolve conventional businesses using digital technologies, including Raksul (printing) and LeNet (laundry). We’ll feature a more comprehensive list of such startups soon, so stay tuned!
delivery 
Junya Mori
Rick Martin
Masaru Ikeda
