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• インプレッシブ賞（グループの部）

インプレッシブ賞（個人の部）

浅見 龍之介さん　Mr. Ryunosuke Asami
慶応義塾大学 商学部 商学科 ３年

Theme03
アジアの特産物を欧米に売り込め！

Ryunosuke Asami

Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to our product presentation. I am Ryunosuke Asami, a professional chef working for a Japanese trading company. Today, I proudly present our Thai specialty, which is a revolutionary food ingredient. I personally call it “magical powder.” Why magical? Because it is healthy, tasty and versatile. You can make anything with this magical powder. Actually, I made chocolate bar, pasta, hamburg steak, and I baked them yesterday - they are bread, like this.

Okay, now you may be interested in what this is made of. Can you guess? Actually, this is made of cricket - insect. This is shocking to you, but after my presentation, you will want to try my crickets.

So, here I have today’s overview. Firstly, I am going to talk about why cricket powder will be successful and after that, I am going to show you some reasons why we chose Italy as the target market. So, let’s begin with the first section - why cricket powder?

Actually, I am going to focus on two characteristics of our product: Nutritional advantage and its acceptable appearance.

So, let’s begin with the first one - nutritional advantage. Surprisingly, crickets are super healthy. To make it easier to understand how healthy it is, let’s compare to product, pasta. The orange one is cricket-used pasta and the green one is traditional pasta, which is very famous in Italy. The only difference here is whether it contains crickets or not. Okay, surprisingly, the orange one, cricket pasta contains less carbohydrate. What’s more that, it is richer in protein and dietary fiber; in short, it is low carbohydrate and high protein diet. As many researchers have found out that this kind of diet will promote fat-burning. So, by introducing cricket pasta, you can lose your weight. Now, you understand how healthy it is.

Next, I am going to talk about its acceptable appearance, which is the most important part. So, I am going to ask you a question - what attitude do you have toward insects like this? Maybe, you may have this kind of attitude, right? Gross. Yeah, I completely agree with you. It is too gross to eat, right? But at the same time, we know that there are lots of gross food ingredients that we actually eat, such as monkfish, snails, cochineal (it is an insect). What matters here is that we have almost no negative attitude toward eating them because they change their shape when they are served like this. The same thing can be said in introducing crickets. If crickets are completely powdered like this, people will have less prejudice toward entomophagy, eating insects.

But this is my personal opinion, so we need a research to support my idea, and I found it. It was conducted in a European country in 2013. Participants were asked to eat several insect preparations shown here. One is boiled insects, powdered insects, and insects coated with chocolate. Wow! Regarding boiled insects, participants could see insects’ body, so let’s say this is visible, but the other two were invisible because participants could not see its insects’ body at all. And the participants rated each of their insect preparations on 10-point scale. The result was pretty amazing. Look at this! The score of the boiled insects was 5.0 - not bad, but if researchers just powdered insects into a small pieces, then participants started to like it. They rated 6.0. What’s more that, when insects were mixed with other food ingredients, such as chocolates, then participants loved to eat them. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? And from this experiment, we can say that invisibility is a key to success. You know, our magical powder has an acceptable appearance, so it will be successful. And now you understand how successful it is.

Next, I am going to talk about our target market - Italy. There are two reasons here. Let me talk about the first reason - combination with Italian food. Well, I have eaten many, many, many cricket products such as pasta, bread and I think the best one is cricket pasta, and actually, some of the Italian people agreed with my opinion. I found an interview, which was conducted in United States and four people joined this interview, including two Italian guys. Most importantly, one of them was Italian professional chef, like me. So, they conducted taste and smell test on the two products shown here - cricket pasta and traditional pasta. Surprisingly, the professional chef said that cricket pasta was more fragrant. It means smell is very good. The other Italian said it was more delicious - it is tastier. What’s more that, all of the four agreed this cricket pasta clung to the sauce more than the traditional one. So, in the end of the interview, all of the four said that they preferred cricket pasta rather than a traditional one.

Okay! Cricket pasta is very delicious, we understand, but the question is, “Are Italian people really going to eat insects, right?” But actually, Italian people are very interested in entomophagy. I have a questionnaire here, which was conducted in Italy in 2016, and 31% of Italian people are positive toward entomophagy - eating insects. Nice! This means one-third of Italian people are ready to eat insects. Well, but for me, it is big enough to start a new business in Italy. But, to make our product more successful, we have to understand why 69% of Italian people are so negative toward entomophagy. Actually, they answered like this: “Okay, insects’ appearance was the most important barrier.” Insects’ appearance! Are you getting me? Our product has an acceptable appearance, so our product will eliminate prejudice from Italian market and by introducing this magical powder in the near future, Italian people will have less prejudice toward the insects and they will be positive like this.

So, let me conclude my presentation. As I said as you know, Italian people love to eat pasta. Then we can introduce magical powder because it is healthy, tasty, and versatile. Italian people can make super delicious pasta with this magical powder. What’s more that, Italian people are interested in entomophagy - eating insects. Then our product will meet consumer needs because it has an acceptable appearance.

Ladies and gentlemen! Let’s revolutionize Italian food industry with this magical powder.

Thank you!