Here’s some spinach I bought in my local Ito Yokado supermarket, which has a picture of the farmer who produced it. I’ve often seen pictures of happy looking farmers above the Japan-produced vegetables in my supermarket, but this is the first time I’ve seen it included in the actual packaging. I like the personal touch it gives, knowing that your veggies were made by a human, not a big hulking farmotron robot. There’s even a QR code which links to a page with more infomation about the farmer. (You should be able to point your keitai at the screen here to link to it.)

more pictures after the jump..

The farmer’s name is Takahashi, but I can’t read his second name. It also gives the origin of the spinach, in this case it came from Gunma (群馬) in a place called Tone Gun Showa (利根郡昭和). He looks like a nice guy, eh? The text says: “Takahashi’s Spinach”.

The big text at the bottom says “See-the-face Vegetable” (顔が見える野菜). Above is the explanation of this system. It says “You can see the actual face of the farmer using a keitai or computer. In order to produce tasty and safe vegetables, we take lots of  care with our fields. Everyone has a great face”. The last phrase, “minna ii kao shite imasu” “みんないい顔しています” means that they’re good people, and it shows on their faces.

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1. My Medium Mikka Mikan Story
2. URLs vs. Search in Japanese Train Ads
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Tags: farmer, gunma, japan, japanese, packaging, spinach, vegetables

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 14:46 and is filed under The Bark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.