In 2022, Japanese snack brand Calbee had to learn to cope with potato shortages. Extreme weather disruptions and supply chain snags forced the company to hike prices three times last year and rethink how it sources its most important ingredient.
The issue is critical to the company as it embarks on an ambitious $1 billion turnaround and overseas expansion plan that will see it plow deeper into the world’s top two economies. The humble potato is serious business for the 74-year-old snack maker. The Tokyo-based firm uses hundreds of thousands of tons of the vegetable annually to make chips in a variety of flavors, from pizza to soy sauce.
These products rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales a year for the company, which posted a profit of 22.2 billion yen ($156 million) in the last fiscal year.
Calbee faced a major crisis when it was confronted with a shortage of potatoes from the summer of 2021 to the fall of 2022. It came against a global backdrop of historically high food prices, as producers grappled with pandemic-related supply chain issues, a historic drought in Brazil and increased global use of vegetable oils, sugar and cereals.
To shore up its supply of potatoes, Calbee is working with farmers across Japan, seeking to boost its domestic supply from 320,000 tons to 400,000 tons a year by the end of the decade. It also estimates it may cut the proportion of potato imports it gets from America, its sole overseas supplier, in half.
Source: edition.cnn.com
