According to Japan’s food giant Ajinomoto, the country is in a “lettuce crisis.” And to battle this problem, the company has made the rather bizarre move of dropping the limited-edition “Tatsuya Fujiwara-faced lettuce” at select supermarkets in the Tokyo and Kansai Areas.
As reported by Oricon, the project is a collaboration between Battle Royale, Death Note, and Kaiji live-action film lead actor Tatsuya Fujiwara, the Ajinomoto corporation, and JA Zen-Noh Nagano, a domestic lettuce producer which accounts for 60% of the country’s lettuce crop from summer through autumn. The lettuce, packaged in translucent plastic wrapped with Fujiwara’s face printed on it, will be sold in a limited quantity of 10,000 “heads.”
Dubbed the “Cook Do Oyster Sauce and Tatsuya Fujiwara’s ‘Buy our lettuce’” campaign, the project comes as an effort to reduce the domestic waste of lettuce during summer. Considering that summers have become significantly hotter in recent years, it has become much more difficult to maintain the freshness of lettuce once it’s shipped from the farms. Furthermore, according to Ajinomoto’s survey on lettuce consumption, over 60% of respondents have experienced discarding lettuce in their households because they couldn’t finish a whole head. As some of the reasons behind this, over 58% of the respondents cite the vegetable “spoiling easily,” and over 46% of the respondents say that there are “few variations in its usage.”
In addition to the irresistible Tatsuya Fujiwara-faced packaging which “longingly gazes at you”, Ajinomoto has also prepared special QR code printed on the back label, leading to a website offering many different lettuce-based recipes featuring the company’s Cook Do Oyster Sauce. The idea behind this is to provide consumers with more inventive ways to use up their leftover lettuce without throwing it away, and thus help reduce lettuce waste during summer months.
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