FUKUOKA -- The city of Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture, is a production center for aonegi Japanese green long leeks. A local company not only cultivates this vegetable, but also has developed a dressing that can be used as a savory sauce for meat or fish.
This dressing from Asakura Bussan Co. is called Asakura Noen yori Negi Dressing (Leek dressing from Asakura farm) and has a mild flavor tinged with the leek along with the aroma of olive oil and garlic.
"My aim is to promote this aonegi we're proud of to the world," company President Shinichi Hanada said.
His company started selling a dressing prepared with aonegi in 2008, using a recipe from an Italian restaurant that was one of his firm's clients. Later, an original dressing was developed that did not use any preservatives or flavor additives to best take advantage of the aonegi that the company grows, focused on safe, worry-free food.
Subtle changes were made in the ratio of ingredients such as soy sauce, salt and vinegar. The flavors of the negi were brought out further with koji, a fermentation mold principally used when making sake.
Hanada imagined "people's happy faces when having this dressing," he said.
Earlier in his life, he did not want to take over his family's farming business because farmers seemed to be busy. He set up his own company in 1987 when he was 32, after leaving the aonegi production division of a local agricultural cooperative. In those days, Hanada developed sales channels for his company on the domestic market, but he faced a setback when the prices of negi grown in Japan nosedived because of the increasing sales of Chinese rivals. It was then, in 2002, that Hanada became conscious of the global market.
"I realized farmers had to compete against not only rivals in Japan, but also in the rest of the world," he said.
This awareness prompted Asakura Bussan to obtain a GLOBALG.A.P. certificate in 2008, which is awarded to agricultural producers who meet an international standard in the safety of their products and the environment. At that time, the company was only the third in Japan to have the certification.
Around that time, Asakura Bussan started selling the negi dressing. Hanada visited business fairs in various places, where he promoted the product to buyers from overseas.
A former English teacher at a high school in Tokyo, Hanada was in his late 20s when he gave up that career to run the family farm after his father, Nobuyoshi, became ill.
"There are many people who are good at English," he said. "But in agriculture, there's perhaps work that only I am able to do."
Now Hanada has set his eyes on the world through agriculture. Since 2014, Asakura Bussan has exported its negi dressing to Hong Kong, the United States, Germany and Taiwan. The product's expiration date when refrigerated is three months. This year, the company plans to start marketing a type of frozen dressing where the expiration date can be extended to more than one year, as part of efforts to further expand the overseas market for his company.
The factory where the negi dressing is produced is dubbed "Speranza," which is the Italian word for "hope," as Hanada wants it to be "a place of hope for changing the future of agriculture."
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