USDBC’s First Japanese Influencer Campaign Reaches Thousands of Viewers

Earlier this month USDBC’s Japan office launched its first influencer campaign with tremendous success. Our programming in Japan has focused primarily on the promotion of U.S. dry beans for bean paste which is used as a filling for traditional Japanese sweets. We have been wanting to expand and diversify our programming to focus on other uses of dry beans for some time and with funding from our original USDA/FAS Agricultural Trade Promotion (ATP) grant, we were finally able to make this happen.

For this campaign, we worked with Ms. Yuu, a popular Japanese food influencer with 858,000 followers on Instagram who watch her cooking demos. Our collaboration with Ms. Yuu included a livestream on Instagram where she presented three recipes using U.S. DRKs and garbanzos. In addition to preparing the dishes, she discussed the quality and health benefits of US dry beans, and noted some key messages regarding sustainability. The recipes she presented were designed for people to use at home for non-bean paste applications. As in many other parts of the world, the impact of COVID means more people are eating at home and the interest in new recipes has grown. Our campaign with Ms. Yuu reached over 19,000 livestream viewers and almost 75,000 viewers of the archived video. Due to the success of this campaign and the high level of interest among Japanese consumers for healthy, sustainable foods, like U.S. dry beans, we are already planning another event for 2021.

Stay tuned…