The tidal wave of shoppers hitting supermarkets came after Japanese snack company, Calbee Inc. announced last Monday that they were temporarily halting the sale of 15 types of potato chips due to a bad crop in Hokkaido, a key potato-producing region, according to Bloomberg.
The northern island was hit by quite a few typhoons last year. Calbee has a market value worth 507.9 billion yen and is 20 percent-owned by PepsiCo Inc. with Calbee having a 73 percent market share of potato chips. Calbee is considering importing potatoes from the U.S. and has already been begging potato farmers on the southern island of Kyushu to harvest their crop earlier than scheduled, according to Fox News.
However, Japan has some very strict import regulations, including a limit on the amount of potatoes that can be imported for use in food products. And that hurdle has made the shortage of potato chips even worse. “We’re doing everything we can to resume sales again,” Rie Makuuchi, a spokeswoman for Tokyo-based Calbee, told Bloomberg.
Potato chips are a really big deal in Japan, as are senbei rice crackers and Pocky sticks, reports the New Zealand Herald. In a TV Asahi poll of 10,000 people and 13 confectionery makers last year, Calbee’s snack products were rated as the most popular and second-most popular snack products in the country. Calbee was also the subject of a prime-time television show that lasted for two hours last year.
The acute potato shortage has some bags of potato chips selling for as much as 1500 yen a bag, or about $14. To further spotlight the dilemma, Calbee’s pizza-flavored chips were going for about 1,250 yen ($16) a bag on Yahoo Japan’s auction website Friday.
But the buying public has been compassionate, sending encouraging tweets to Calbee, which, by the way, tweeted their own apology for the potato chip shortage. “I realized how addicted I was to potato chips after the halt,” one person tweeted. “I’ll be waiting for sales to resume. Hang in there!”
