Changing Demographics

The population of Japan’s of elderly people over 65 years old is predicted to exceed one-third the total population in the middle of the 21st century, and the overall population will start to decrease before 2010 as the birthrate falls. In addition 70 percent of women over 15 years old are now in the workforce, that’s 50 percent of Japan’s ‘homemakers’, according to a survey by the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs,.

As a result, the changes in food consumption and living habits are being seen now – the number of people eating-out and buying cooked food products continues to increase.

Consumer concerns about the safety of foodstuffs as a result of BSE, and bird flu, and last year’s the false claims on commodities by Japanese food manufacturers, has led more than 70 percent of Japanese shoppers to pay more attention to safety when purchasing food: Consumers now want to know the origin, components, calorific content, and product expiration data, and they want to get information on who is its supplier – without this information, the consumer simply will not buy the product.

The role of the package to disclose and deliver information on the contents or storage conditions has been the subject of considerable R&D: as a result two solutions are being implemented: Intelligent packaging loaded with various indicators and Smart packaging allowing information to be added during distribution. 


One example is labels which use irreversible ink in order to disclose the history of the storage temperature of products delivered by refrigerated truck. If the storage temperature exceeds 25℃ the ink discolors irreversibly, showing that distribution did not meet the required refrigerated transportation conditions.

RFID tags are being experimented with by the Japan Agricultural Cooperative (JAC) to develop agricultural traceability systems, in which RF tags are included when packaging fruit and vegetables for distribution to control and record the history of their cultivation and distribution, across the entire supply chain management and with Japan’s high-tech response to packaging, RFID technology the industry is looking to it to act as a “master card in society”.