Food scammed customers with fake photo of Japanese farmers

At Japanese supermarkets it is pretty common to see fruits, vegetables, and rice with labels showing the photographs and names of the farmers who produced them. It’s a nice marketing strategy that makes customers feel like they are supporting small producers and also gives on a sense that you trust the safety of the food in question.

But can you trust the labels? Not all the time, apparently.

It has come to light that a Japanese company called Takenoya imported several hundred tons of bamboo shoots from China, sent them to other companies that put fake “grown in Japan” labels on them, and sold them at supermarkets across the country for about doubled the price of Chinese bamboo shoots. One factory even had a few of its employees dress up for a photo of fake Kumamoto Prefecture farmers it placed on its package.

According to TV news reports, Takenokoya convinced several packaging companies to cooperate in the fraud. Unnamed sources at some of the companies have stated that they knew what they were doing was wrong, but cooperated because they feared losing Takenokoya as a customer.

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