<Shopify Merchant Interview Series>
"Yasai wo MOTTO" is a line of shelf-stable soups made with domestic Japanese vegetables. The company behind it, Mon Marché Co., Ltd., grew out of the food business of the Suzuyo Group, whose core business is logistics.
The roots of the Suzuyo Group's food business trace back to Shimizu Foods, founded in 1929. In an era when the Great Depression had left the streets full of the unemployed, the company began by manufacturing canned tuna, partly as a way to create jobs. Living alongside the community, living alongside its employees — that idea, Suzuyo's philosophy of "tomoiki" (symbiosis), is where it all began. The group today includes two manufacturers, Shimizu Foods and S.S.K Foods, alongside which Mon Marché has taken the position of retailer, handling direct sales through direct marketing.
Yuji Kono, Managing Director of Mon Marché Co., Ltd., joined this business in 2016. He had worked in import/export trade and warehouse logistics at Suzuyo, and this move into mail order was a field he had no prior experience in. At the time, the online store accounted for only a tiny fraction of the overall business. Today, it has grown to support 70% of the business.
Rely on listing ads, and a spike in cost-per-click can collapse the entire business model overnight. So instead, the company built its sales around raising brand awareness. We asked about the company's e-commerce strategy — one where the cart system has changed repeatedly to match evolving needs, while the underlying approach to selling has never wavered.
From 50,000 Yen a Month Online to 70% of the Business
"Yasai wo MOTTO" may look e-commerce-centered today, but its foundation is direct marketing — dealing directly with customers through physical stores and phone orders. The online store started out as a very small presence alongside that. That same online channel is now the company's main battlefield, having grown to carry 70% of sales.
(Yasai wo MOTTO Online Site)
—— How did "Yasai wo MOTTO" get started as a business?
Yuji Kono (hereafter, Kono) It began with physical stores and phone orders first, and after running that for about a year, we started introducing e-commerce. Combining the physical store and analog mail-order business, our annual revenue at the start was somewhere around 200 million yen, give or take, and the online store was doing something like 50,000 to 100,000 yen a month — it really started from a very small place.
—— I see. What's the current split between e-commerce and everything else?
Kono At first the physical store and offline mail order were roughly 1-to-1, with the online store barely registering at all, but these days online has come to support about 70% of the overall business. As for how much the physical store and offline business have grown by comparison, it's roughly 1.5 times what it was back then.
That said, we're not trying to strengthen the physical store or offline business per se — we consider online to be our main battlefield. Profitability of the stores matters, of course, but we position them more as a kind of gallery, a place for people to get to know us. We're not trying to turn a profit there specifically. It's not a strategy of opening a hundred stores across Tokyo and making money that way either.
(Store photo)
—— Even though you're not expanding the stores, is there potential for them to grow alongside e-commerce?
Kono Of course, if the opportunity arises. Maybe this is with the benefit of hindsight, but our company operates as a fairly small, focused team. When there's a lot going on and things get siloed, you end up with problems like doing one thing online and something different in the physical stores. So we work across those silos instead, and that makes it important to think about whether we can really stretch our hands far enough to also cover physical stores.
Physical stores involve people, so they require thorough training in customer service. Whether it's worth putting in that much effort to expand them — I don't think that's really the right direction for us.
Not Selling Through Clever Tricks — Selling by Raising Awareness
—— Is there a difference between your online customer base and your customers through other channels?
Kono This has become especially clear recently, but phone orders tend to skew toward an older age group, while online store customers skew younger. In terms of retention, phone-order customers tend to be more loyal, while web customers are less so. I think that's true of e-commerce in general.
Customers who used to place phone orders around 10 years ago — people around 50, for example — are now increasingly using the online store too. But I don't think it's so much that a generation has changed as it is that the number of people who use the internet as part of daily life has simply grown, and that volume keeps increasing.
—— Is the customer's first touchpoint basically the web, or do you deliberately design around offline touchpoints as well?
Kono For example, the idea of completing everything within the online channel is the web-marketing way of thinking about it. The digital-marketing approach is something like: get discovered offline, then buy online. Our business model aims for something similar — get people to first learn about our brand somewhere else, and then have them come to our own site when it's time to buy.
Some customers happen to come across us on the web and buy directly, while others learn about "Yasai wo MOTTO" through something like transit ads or TV commercials, and then, given the opportunity, come and buy on our own site. We're thinking about getting people to know us first, and then bringing them to the site from there.
That said, what we're aiming for isn't growing revenue through clever marketing tricks — it's growing revenue by raising brand awareness. That's the goal.
—— So you're deliberately keeping some distance from the kind of selling that chases efficiency.
Kono That's right. With listing ads, it's about how efficiently you can acquire a customer at a low CPA and grow revenue that way. But with that approach, the moment impressions or cost-per-click rise, the whole business model can collapse in an instant. Since we can see that risk coming, we've chosen the approach of raising awareness instead.
Even When E-Commerce Is the Main Battlefield, E-Commerce Isn't the Goal
—— What role does e-commerce play within your business?
Kono E-commerce is really just a means — a way of buying, a way of using the product — so it's less a business specialized in e-commerce and more that we're a business that also happens to operate through e-commerce. Rather than thinking "we want to make e-commerce work somehow," what matters is figuring out the right positioning as a food retail business.
Beyond e-commerce, our business also includes analog channels like physical stores and phone orders, and we deliberately avoid siloing those, working across them instead — that's the kind of business structure that generates synergy.
—— Have you considered B2B sales channels, like supermarkets?
Kono If we only thought about revenue, B2B sales to places like supermarkets would actually be easier. But our products are built around a commitment to domestic Japanese vegetables, and part of our strength is the freedom to, say, simply not produce something in a poor-harvest year. If we became a B2B business that requires stable supply, I don't think we'd be able to bring out our own uniqueness — the sharp edge that defines us. So we simply choose not to go down that path.
Also, because we're committed to our ingredients, our cost ratio is high. In terms of giving something back to our customers too, if we built a business model with distributors sitting in between us and the customer, prices would inevitably rise, or quality would have to drop. But that runs against our whole concept, so we want to use genuinely good ingredients and offer them at a price customers can feel good about. That's the principle we've held to throughout.
Switching Cart Platforms Repeatedly, Until Landing on Shopify
In the early days of Japanese e-commerce, ASP-type carts — vendor-provided, subscription-based e-commerce carts that could be launched quickly — were the entry point for many businesses. While they kept initial costs low, they had real limits when it came to adding features or customizing. Shopify, meanwhile, established its Japan subsidiary in 2017. It initially positioned itself around cross-border e-commerce, but with Japanese-language support and extensibility through apps as its strengths, it spread across the domestic market alongside the rise of D2C.
"Yasai wo MOTTO" also switched platforms repeatedly, each time because the current one couldn't do what they needed, before finally arriving at Shopify. Counting from the original ASP-type cart, it was their fourth cart system.
—— The e-commerce site started on a different platform, and it's now built on Shopify.
Kono When we started our e-commerce business, honestly we had no idea which way was up when it came to choosing a cart system, so we started with an ASP-type cart just to get going. ASP-type carts have their pros and cons, fully custom-built systems have their pros and cons, and Shopify today has its own pros and cons too — where we currently stand is the result of trial and error around figuring out what matters most to us.
Our current Shopify setup is, I believe, our fourth cart counting from the very first one. In the end, we kept switching because there was always something we wanted to do that the ASP-type cart couldn't handle.
—— Has what you prioritize when choosing a cart platform changed as you've gone through this?
Kono E-commerce changes faster than other kinds of business, so we have to keep responding to that change — in other words, operate based on a market-in mindset, moving in step with trends and the times. So there are things that turned out different from what we originally expected, and there are also things we're now shaping in a certain way precisely because of where things stand today. That's how we've kept changing.
Right now, for example, how we work with AI is a really important question. It's become a matter of figuring out how to move forward with Shopify and AI together.
The underlying approach to selling never changed, but the platform carrying it kept changing again and again. Having arrived at Shopify as their fourth platform, how has "Yasai wo MOTTO" actually run things there?
In Part 2, we bring in Yukiko Takenaka, Manager of the Sales Promotion Section at Mon Marché Co., Ltd., who handles the actual Shopify build and operations, to hear about what the migration really looked like, how they choose apps, and how they work on growing the brand.
