The American ag booth
Oct 29, 2021
OSAKA, JAPAN -- FABEX Kansaic, Japan's largest trade fair for commercial food, cooking ingredients, equipment, and containers, took place October 13-15, and USA Rice set up a booth in the Osaka Agricultural Trade Office (ATO) pavilion -- the first time USA Rice has participated in a trade exhibition in Japan since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 24,000 people attended the three-day show, including Chanda Berk, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service's ATO Tokyo, and Richard Mei, Consul General of the American Consulate Osaka-Kobe, who stopped by the USA Rice booth to check out a paella display prepared with U.S. medium grain and receive rice samples and recipe cards.
“We’re grateful to Alexander Blamberg, director of ATO Osaka, and his staff who gave us great support at this year’s booth featuring “takikomi,” a way to cook rice with spice and ingredients in dishes like paella,” said Jim Guinn, USA Rice director of Asia promotion programs. “The recipe cards we handed out had four different paella recipes cooked using a frying pan, a hot pot, a rice cooker, and a paella pan.”
Takikomi is also the theme of this year’s U.S. Medium Grain Chef Menu Contest, sponsored by USA Rice and scheduled for December 4 in Tokyo. The contest is just one of the promotional efforts ongoing in the Kansai and Kyushu regions of Japan to educate traders and consumers on the versatility of U.S. medium grain rice.
Japan is the second largest market for U.S. rice in terms of value and the second most important market for U.S. milled rice.