世論 What Japan Thinks

With this summer’s poor weather causing a thin harvest of vegetables thus an increase in prices, iShare decided to look at a current hot topic, oddly-shaped vegetables.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 21st of August 2009 538 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private online questionnaire. 56.3% of the sample were male, 29.7% in their twenties, 31.4% in their thirties, and 38.8% in their forties.

I’ve not seen any oddly-shaped veggies in the supermarket myself, although I’ve bought such ones at a farmers market or other direct from the farm outlet.

As for price increases, potatoes and onions are definitely up about 25%, cucumbers are in a bit of short supply, so it’s difficult to say, and lettuce is very expensive, as most seem to be about the same price as last year but half the size. I’ve not really noticed any difference for other veggies, however.

Research results

Q1: When buying vegetables at a supermarket, etc, which of the following is most important? (Sample size=538)

	All	Male N=303	Female N=235
Freshness	62.8%	60.4%	66.0%
Regularly-shaped	0.7%	1.3%	0.0%
Price	36.4%	38.3%	34.0%

Q2: How often do you usually eat vegetables? (Sample size=538)

	All	Male N=303	Female N=235
Often	64.7%	61.4%	68.9%
Not very often	33.3%	35.6%	30.2%
Never	2.0%	3.0%	0.9%

Q3: Compared with last year, do you feel that vegetable prices are higher this year? (Sample size=538)

	All	Male N=303	Female N=235
Yes	59.3%	54.5%	65.5%
No	40.7%	45.5%	34.5%

Q4: Due to the poor weather this year causing price increases, cheaper irregularly-shaped vegetables seem to be getting popular. What do you think about these oddly-shaped vegetables? (Sample size=538)

	All	Male N=303	Female N=235
Have already bought	32.5%	28.1%	38.3%
Really want to buy	25.5%	25.4%	25.5%
Might buy if I had the opportunity	36.2%	38.9%	32.8%
Don’t want to buy	5.8%	7.6%	3.4%

Q5: Due to the current high prices of vegetables, the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food is investigating asking farmers to ship irregularly-shaped vegetables. What do you think about oddly-shaped vegetables coming into the marketplace? (Sample size=538)

	All	Male N=303	Female N=235
Very good idea	70.3%	64.4%	77.9%
Quite good idea	23.2%	26.1%	19.6%
Quite poor idea	4.3%	5.9%	2.1%
Very poor idea	2.2%	3.6%	0.4%