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| Mr. Sato’s Mulberry Tea Co. Takes Root Following Tsunami Posted: 28 Aug 2012 10:59 AM PDT  [Editor's note: More than a year after Japan's Tohoku region was devastated by a tsunami, small local businesses are bouncing back, helped by low-interest loans and startup assistance provided through a $2 million grant from NVIDIA. This is the first in a series of profiles of businesses benefiting from the program, dubbed Operation Kizuna, after the Japanese word for "bond of love and friendship."] KESENNUMA, Japan – When you've been selling things for as long as Norifumi Sato has and have his talent for the hard sell, you recognize a good thing when you see it. From the moment a year ago when Sato reported for his first day of work at a mulberry tea company, in Japan's northern prefecture of Iwate, "I just knew this was it," he recalled. "It" was Sato's idea of running his own business – but he didn't have the means to go it alone right away. At the time he was just thankful to have a job. Two months had passed since a tsunami had barreled onshore in Kesennuma, a port city on Japan's northeastern coast. In an instant, Sato's home and the shark fin croquette shop he'd run next door for more than a decade were wiped off the map. Sato lived in a shelter for a couple of months and then moved to a cramped prefab three-room temporary home that he was sharing with his wife and his mother. Despite his precarious situation, Sato told his boss at the tea company that he planned to be around for no more than two years. Before he was halfway there, he quit. "By then, I knew enough to do it on my own," he said. In April, Sato founded Kesennuma Kuwacha Co., with seed money from his and his wife's savings. It's a tiny operation. His office is the 78-square-foot tatami room where he sleeps and eats his meals in the prefab flat he's called home for the past 15 months. There's a flat-screen TV in one corner, a case with tea cups in another, a row of color-coded folders and a fax machine against the back wall. A set of plastic drawers holds a sampling of his company's products: two types of green tea made from the leaves of a mulberry tree, sencha and mattcha, or leaf and powdered. Export dreams for mulberry tea
Unlike ordinary green tea, mulberry leaf tea has no caffeine or bitter aftertaste. Most Japanese think of mulberry leaves as food for the larva of a moth bred to produce silk. But Chinese medical practitioners have prescribed the leaves and berries to treat ailments for centuries. Recently U.S. researchers have shown that the leaves can help balance blood-sugar levels in patients with type-2 diabetes, a condition that afflicts millions of Americans. Sato is counting on the purported health benefits of mulberry leaves to reach customers outside of Japan. "There are millions in Japan who are thought to be diabetic," he said. "And in the U.S. the numbers are several times that of Japan." (Diabetes affects 10.7 million people in Japan, or 8.4 per cent of the population, compared to 25.8 million people in the U.S., or about 8.3 per cent of the population, according to official statistics.) On a recent afternoon, Sato drove out to a family-owned two-acre mulberry tree farm in Kesennuma. It's one of two farms he buys leaves from. "I need more than one farm just in case there's an outbreak of disease," he said. Sato, 63, has curly, gray hair, a slight paunch and an unflagging ebullience. The afternoon sun was searing and soon his polo shirt was soaked through. As he walked up to one tree after another to inspect their leaves, he mopped at his brow with a small towel draped around his neck. But the heat did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm and he strode around the property with such purposefulness that he seemed constantly in a rush. Sato stroked a lime-green leaf larger than his hand and said: "Beautiful, isn't it?" For his first big harvest in June, Sato bought the leaves off half the trees on the property — about 4.4 tons. The trees grow so fast in spring and summer that Sato eventually wants to pick all the trees clean three times a year. Standing on a slope at the farm, he turned to a woman in an apron – Tomoko Saito – who had emerged from the house fronting the property. "I want to be making so much tea that there aren't enough trees here to keep up," he told her. She nodded. Since the end of the Second World War, her family's organic farm had supplied the leaves for silkworm growers. But with fewer Japanese buying kimonos and the silk industry shrinking, the family had come to see their prospects as grim. "We stopped two years ago and were thinking of giving up the farm," she said.
Enter Sato. He'd heard about the Saito family's mulberry tree farm from a friend who lived nearby. When Sato quit the Iwate tea company to go it alone, he got his friend to help him contact the family and negotiated a deal. Multibillion-dollar drinks market Still, if there ever was a perfect pitchman, it's Sato. He has been selling things since going to work at a grocery store after high school, and has a gift for mesmerizing anyone within earshot with his stories. Before last year's disaster, his shark fin croquettes stand was the talk of the town. "Others had been making shark fin croquettes but they were adding pork for flavor. I was the first anywhere to use only shark meat. I spent six months trying to figure out how to get rid of the strong ammonia odor," he said. "One morning a TV show featured my shop and soon the phone started ringing and emails started pouring in, from morning till night. It took months to fill all the orders!" These days Sato is so busy with his new enterprise that last year's tsunami seems scarcely an afterthought. Truth is, he barely escaped with his life that day. When the magnitude-9 earthquake hit, he was across town and he raced home to find his wife and mother taking refuge on the second floor. He knew from experience that they had to get to higher ground: He was 11 in 1960 when a magnitude 9.5 quake in Chile triggered a tsunami that sped thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean and flooded his hometown in Japan. Sato drove the two to a designated shelter and returned to the neighborhood to warn others. As he was about to gather some things from his house, he turned to see a wave taller than a two-story building less than a block away and he sprinted to a tall building nearby, reaching the stairs just as the water closed in. From an upper floor he watched the waves demolish his home and shop. "Unless you act, you won't get anywhere" The leaves he picked in June will be ready to sell in September. But he'll need someplace more spacious than his own tatami room to package it. Thanks to a grant of 1.5 million yen ($19,000) from NVIDIA, administered through PlaNet Finance Japan, Sato will be able to pay for part of a new building, which Samaritan's Purse, a U.S. relief organization, has sent volunteers to help put up. When finished in the coming weeks, the building, located on his sister's land in Kesennuma, will have a storage room, packaging and labeling machines and office space. "Not many people know about mulberry leaves and teas. It's all about how you market these products to consumers," he said. "We think the Internet is the best channel and we want to take this overseas. We are already talking with Japanese grocer Uwajimaya in Seattle!" He chuckled and added: "To other people it might seem pretty aggressive. But for me it's just common sense. Unless you act, you won't get anywhere." | ||||
| 1,500 Volunteers To Transform San Jose Community Farm Posted: 27 Aug 2012 12:13 PM PDT  NVIDIA will unleash some 1,500 volunteers and more than $300,000 in materials, project management services and volunteer labor later this year to transform Veggielution, an urban community farm in San Jose, Calif., not far from our head office. For two days in December, employees, their families and community members will work together to enhance the farm as part of Project Inspire, NVIDIA's annual volunteer event held in place of a holiday party. This is the sixth year for the program, which unites our employees in sharing their good fortune to help others in our community. Our employees selected Veggielution among several projects submitted for consideration. It stood out for them because of its commitment to provide healthy food to low-income families and educate people about the importance of incorporating fresh produce into their diets.
Our Project Inspire volunteers will prepare four acres of newly acquired land and plant an orchard. We'll also build an outdoor classroom, a retail farm stand and a packing shed for organizing and prepping produce for sale to individuals, community groups and restaurants. Amie Frisch, Veggielution's executive director and co-founder, is passionate when asked what it meant to be selected as a Project Inspire recipient. "We're focused on building a more sustainable food system in Silicon Valley. We want to improve the health of all families and help them understand the importance of where their food comes from. NVIDIA's support will dramatically expand our production capabilities so we can feed and educate many more people, and it comes at the perfect time as we are tripling the size of our farm," she said. In addition to our work with Veggielution, our volunteers will be improving the community gathering spaces around Emma Prusch Farm Park, a historic farm deeded to the city of San Jose in 1962 and host to more than 250,000 Silicon Valley residents each year. Six Years of Improving Communities The choice of Veggielution fits well within our tradition of Project Inspire sites that tend to focus on educating youth about nutrition and helping to improve access to produce for low-income families. In 2007, we planted an education garden at the East Palo Alto Charter School in California. In 2008, we built a greenhouse to help launch the Green Academy at William C. Overfelt High School in San Jose. In 2010, we built more than 60 garden beds for low-income families at San Jose's History Park. Last year we held our biggest event to date, with more than 10,000 collective hours of volunteer work spent helping transform Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale, Calif. The results were dramatic. Helped by our efforts, Full Circle Farm grew 78 percent more produce in the first five months of 2012 than the previous year and saw a 144 percent sales increase. The follow-on effect in the community has been significant, too, as five other corporations jumped in to provide funding and numerous employee volunteers to complete additional projects, such as wheelchair access, handicap parking and a shade structure for the farm stand. Veggielution and the Prusch Farm Park Foundation
Veggielution is dedicated to empowering youth and adults from diverse backgrounds to create a sustainable food system in East San Jose. It offers nutritious, locally grown food, runs youth programs and gives people in the community a chance to work the soil and learn the importance of eating healthy food and knowing where it came from. The farm is set in Emma Prusch Farm Park, which is run by the Prusch Farm Park Foundation, whose mission is to support Emma Prusch's wishes that her farm remain an agricultural preserve with a rural, country atmosphere. [Editor's note: Read about NVIDIA's selection of Veggielution for Project Inspire in the Mercury News. ] |
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