Expansion of Miso Exports to France and the Challenges for Manufacturers

The Japanese government has set an aggressive objective in the exports of agricultural, forestry, and fishery products, which seems to be a repetition of previous strategy that resulted in the unmet objective. In order to avoid another failure, producers of export products need to find a way to have their products accepted in the broader segments of the target market by consumers who are not necessarily interested in Japanese food. When an unknown product is introduced in the market, it will be forced to withdraw unless the consumers recognize its value in use. The value in use is generated as the outcome of the repeated interaction between the consumers, who evaluate and interpret the meaning of the product, and the producer, who modifies the product’s physical attributes based on such feedback collected from the market. Such reconciliation between the meaning and the product attributes is repeated until the gaps are eliminated and the value in use is generated. This paper applies the cross-border edition of this mechanism of value in use generation introduced by Kawabata (2021) as the base to understand the formation and the functions of the export food system for traditional Japanese food products, and studies three cases of miso manufacturers’ direct export to France. As a consequence, it was revealed that the French distributors play a key role in the system, suggesting further edition of the value in use generation model to include the functions to be delt with by the distributors. The renewed edition clearly explains the challenges to the functioning of the mechanism that generates value in use of miso in France caused by the insufficiency of information sharing between the distributor and the manufacturer, indicating that formation of the food system is a start but not sufficient in expanding exports.