Estimating The Japanese Organic Food Market In 2018 Using Consumer Panel Data:A Tentative Result

Summary

As part of an ongoing research project in which we attempt to identify what are needed to produce reliable, and internationally comparable organic market data, we conducted a pilot data collection and made an estimate on the size of the organic food market in Japan using household panel data. In the household panel data, we identified 9180 items as organic food products. Using the list of the organic food items, the total purchase value in the year 2018 was estimated to be about 44.3 billion yen (369 million Euros or 403 USD), by far the smaller amount compared to preceding estimates. By extrapolating the purchase to the entire population and adding the estimate on the retail sales of organic products that do not carry JAN code, we estimated the total retail values of organic products in 2018 was 108.9 billion yen. There is a big gap between our estimate and preceding estimates, and it is important to note the difference in the definitions of organic food market and the methodology of data collection employed.