Japan’s Internet maverick cashing in on Wagyu beef

TOKYO: Japan’s corporate enfant terrible Takafumi Horie built one of the country’s most successful Internet businesses, stood for parliament, went to prison and started a space company that aims to put the country’s first privately funded rocket into orbit. Now he has a new frontier: cattle.

The founder of Interstellar Technologies has teamed up with his friend Hisato Hamada to form Wagyumafia, which brands, promotes and distributes Wagyu beef.

Horie, 44, compares the soft, fatty meat with Domaine Roman©e-Conti, a wine estate in Burgundy, France, that has built its brand into one of the most expensive in the world.

“While Wagyu is as scarce as good Burgundy, it has been sold cheaply by JA,” said Horie, referring to Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, the nation’s largest farmers’ group. “I’m confident that the beef can be sold at much higher prices in global markets.”

Since unveiling their first, members-only restaurant in Tokyo in September 2016, Horie and Hamada have opened three more shops. Membership has risen to 1,000, about 300 of whom are from overseas.

Wagyumafia has held tasting events in New York, Paris and Singapore and plans to open its first overseas restaurant in San Francisco next year.

“By mafia we mean a syndicate of ex-IT entrepreneurs,” said Hamada, 40, former publisher of an online movie magazine.

“Our project is to deliver Wagyu produced by selected farmers directly to global buyers, bypassing middlemen and without advertising. We find customers via social media and pop-up” events.

Wagyu comes from four Japanese breeds of beef cattle – Black, Brown, Shorthorn and Polled – that typically produce intensely marbled meat, with a higher percentage of unsaturated fat than most other beef. That makes the soft, flavourful steaks the world’s most-expensive meat.

At Hamada’s new shop in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, a favourite area for foodies, Wagyu sells for 30,000 yen (US$268) a kg. (The cheapest bottle of Romanee Conti costs about 46,000 yen, with top vintages in the city fetching more than one million yen.)

Wagyu prices are rising in Japan due to the increased costs of calves, Hamada said.

The average price of a Wagyu-producing calf reached a record 852,287 yen in December, more than double the rate four years ago, according to Zen-Noh, the trading arm of JA.

As many of the older farmers retire, companies are being forced to rear their own cattle to keep up supplies.

“To cope with rising costs for Wagyu calves, we decided to start breeding them by ourselves,” said Aichiro Yamaguchi, a spokesman for Japanese retailer Daiei, a subsidiary of the nation’s biggest supermarket chain operator Aeon Co.

Daiei, which operates Wagyu feedlots on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, bought 15 Wagyu cows in December for breeding.

The company plans to expand its herd to 500 by 2020 and aims to slash beef-production costs by 30%, he said.

Hamada first met a Wagyu farmer when he was distributing “Food, Inc,” a documentary film about corporate farming in the US.

A farmer who saw the film invited Hamada to visit his farm in the southern Japanese prefecture of Miyazaki.

The farmer, Muneharu Ozaki, feeds his cattle organic ryegrass and natural mineral water, with a home-made mix of 12 ingredients including barley and corn. He shuns additives such as antiseptics and antibiotics.

“What I want to produce is tasty beef that my family members can enjoy without any safety concerns,” said Ozaki, who studied cattle farming for two years in the US. — Bloomberg