After completing a master's degree in agricultural science, he joined cifra as a new graduate in 2016.
Before joining the company, I was involved in research into pesticides and fertilizers at graduate school.
During my research, I felt there was a discrepancy between what researchers consider to be food safety and what consumers want as "safety and security."
While I was job hunting, mainly in the food industry, I became interested in the idea of creating a vegetable brand based on "safety and security," which is about vegetables you can see the faces of. Also, the employees I met at cifra during my interview had a calm and charming demeanor, so I decided to join the company.
Since joining the company, I have been involved in tasks that ensure the safety and security of the vegetables shipped to the vegetable farm, which is to say, tasks that support the foundation of the brand.
We check the cultivation history of all producers before shipping (information such as when and where the seeds were sown, and what pesticides and fertilizers were used), and we can see the faces of the vegetables we ship. We also check against our own standards to ensure that they are safe to ship.
We sometimes visit the cultivation site to check that there are no problems with the cultivation conditions or storage conditions of the products to be shipped.
The required knowledge spans agriculture, food safety, and food labeling, and there is a lot of highly specialized information to remember, but I believe that it is my responsibility to make safety and security, which are generally taken for granted, a reality, and that this is the most rewarding part of the job.
Vegetables you can see the faces of. Thousands of producers from all over Japan ship their produce to us.
Of course, the cultivation methods and cultures of Hokkaido and Kyushu are very different, but we sell vegetables that have been cultivated with care and pride by each producer.
As a team that checks the cultivation history of producers and is in constant communication with the production areas, we believe that the challenge is to capture the characteristics and particularities of each producer and communicate this to customers within the limited scope of the Face-to-Face Vegetables website.
This may not be unique to agriculture, but agriculture is also undergoing an era of change.
For example, topics that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago, such as the systematization of cultivation, the spread of producer certification systems, and agricultural cooperative reform, are being discussed every day.
It is of course important to quickly obtain the latest trends and respond to them within the current business operations, but we are also required to create new systems that only cifra, which consistently supports a wide range of fields from agriculture to retail, can do.
By collecting information on a daily basis and connecting various stakeholders, including producers and intermediate distributors, I dream of contributing to the creation of a system that will help develop the agricultural industry.
English