Focusing on the business opportunities for foreign tourists, Japanese companies are actively laying out the decaf coffee market.

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Japan's coffee consumption has been rising. Japan's total coffee bean imports are 5% higher than five years ago, but even if decaf bean imports have doubled in the past five years, they still account for less than 1% of the overall coffee import market. With the increasing demand for decaffeinated drinks by Japanese and growing foreign tourists, Japanese manufacturers see opportunities in the decaffeinated market and begin to sprint for decaf products.

Japan's decaffeinated coffee drinkers are mainly pregnant women, who are worried about the impact of caffeine on their fetuses, the Nikkei News (Nikkei Asian Review) reported. Now the coffee industry is targeting people with low caffeine needs, such as the elderly and young people who usually drink only black or green tea, as well as a big increase in the number of foreign tourists and night customers as the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games approaches. Starbucks in Japan, for example, began selling low-caffeine products in 2017, mainly for night customers.

Japan's decaffeinated market never really took off. The total amount of low-caffeinated beans imported in 2000 was 594 tons, and it only slowly increased to 3023 tons in 2016, but the growth suddenly accelerated in 2015, which prompted producers of low-caffeinated coffee to expand their product lines, and retailers also began to increase the selling space of low-caffeinated beans. It is hoped to increase the import of decaf beans from 1% of total coffee imports to the same 5% as in the United States and Europe.

Generally speaking, there are several main methods to remove caffeine, such as dichloromethane solvent extraction, carbon dioxide extraction, Swiss water treatment and so on. It is difficult for consumers to figure out how decaffeinated coffee is produced, and there are no specific labelling rules that require companies to disclose this information. But some brands will use decaffeinated sources as part of their advertisements, such as Blue bottle, which advertises that the low-caffeinated products sold are treated with Swiss water.

Some very large coffee manufacturers have their own decaf bean manufacturing plants, but others sign contracts directly with companies that handle decaf beans or with importers. According to the report, one of the obstacles to producing decaffeinated coffee in Japan is the relatively high cost of production, because Japan cannot find agents to produce low-caffeinated beans like European and American companies. Japanese coffee bean manufacturers must produce their own. They must soak beans in water and then expose them to pressurized carbon dioxide, making Japanese low-caffeinated beans 50% more expensive than regular coffee beans.

But now, with the support of the Japanese Olympic Games, foreign tourists are expected to increase demand for decaf coffee, so instant coffee brands BLENDY, KEY COFFEE and UCC, produced by food manufacturer Weizhi, have all launched decaf products.

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