A person who lives for the feast. Nissan Chikusan Murakami, Sei Murakami

I have an older brother, so I had no intention of taking over the family business. After graduating from college, I worked as a salaried salesman for a trading company for about three years. When I was thinking about changing jobs, I looked into various companies and wondered how Nissan Livestock would fare as a company. I thought about it from an objective point of view.

In sales jobs in trading companies up to that point, the question was, "How much cost advantage can I get out of it? How much do people like me? However, in the meat wholesale business, I realized that it was a business where professionals worked with each other, and "how much do you know about the product? I realized that in the meat wholesale business, "discernment" is the key to success, and I was attracted to this business.

Before joining the company, I lived and worked for a month with a Yonezawa beef breeder. For the first three to four years after joining the company, I started at the processing site, dismantling and deboning the beef and sharpening the knives of my seniors. After that, I improved my product knowledge through sales, reformed on-site hygiene, and obtained "SQF certification. A short time later, I became a representative, but the Great East Japan Earthquake struck around that time, and the company's business performance was sluggish. I decided to take over the family business, but I was impatient because I did not have the management knowledge, so I obtained an MBA while attending the company.

Before I started attending MBA school, I used to look only at the problem in front of me, saying, "Wagyu beef is not profitable because the market price is too high," but at the school, I learned about matters in other industries, so I gradually came to see business from a bird's-eye view.

For example, I was worried about my company's performance after the Great East Japan Earthquake, but when I looked into the past, I found that there were cases of similar situations in other industries, and in the beef industry, there were numerous problems such as BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) in 2001 and foot-and-mouth disease in 2010. In Miyazaki, 290,000 cows were slaughtered in order to end foot-and-mouth disease. The pregnancy and delivery cycle of cows is similar to that of humans, taking about 10 months, and only one cow is born at a time, so the number of cows was greatly reduced, prices skyrocketed, and the entire industry's performance remained stagnant. I looked into companies that had survived such adversity and took hints from them on how to get through it.

The instructors at the school included the presidents of prominent consulting firms, all of whom had studied in the real world, and the entire class would discuss and think about the difficulties of their work together, so we didn't just finish the class. We would often go to a pub afterwards and discuss again... (laughs).

Then I got a bird's eye view of the business, and I thought again, "What is the value of our company?" I realized that the value of being a connoisseur was something that I could bring to the table.

Farmers can taste the vegetables they ship, "How are they doing this year?" but a cattle producer cannot taste the cattle he raises. To put it in an extreme way, the only evaluation a cattle producer could make was based on "how many thousands of yen per kilogram" the cattle received at the auction, which was only a visual evaluation. However, I have come to think that even livestock is food, so the evaluation should be based on how the consumer tastes the food. I have come to think of it this way.

So, we eat all the cows we buy, one by one, is the aroma strong or light? Is it light? Is the fat smooth? Is it rich? Is the flavor light? Is it rich? In order to make detailed evaluations such as these, we began keeping a "Niyama Notebook. I would like to make all of this information available to consumers by converting it into data and typing in the individual identification number, so that consumers can see this information and be informed of uniform evaluation standards. If we can do this and someday create a culture where people can evaluate and enjoy Wagyu beef as if it were wine, saying, "This cow tastes like...," I think this will motivate the producers as well.

In addition, we are now visiting local producers every month to find out what kind of cattle this producer is aiming for? What kind of feed are they feeding? We interview each producer individually and add the information to the "Nissan Notebook". Of course, we have not been able to visit all of them yet, but this month we visited more than 10 producers in Yamagata and Miyagi prefectures. As a result, if we analyze the data based on pedigree, age in months (age), and production area, we can expect, for example, a tasty result if we cross this pedigree with this pedigree and this pedigree with each other. It would be great if we could provide feedback to the producers.