TOKACHI REGION, Hokkaido – Fourteen-year-old Keiji Sugawara excitedly digs into the soil, pulling out and unearthing potatoes that he quickly fills up a cardboard box with.
He has been waiting for this day to harvest with his own hands the single most important ingredient in his favourite Calbee potato chips, even sheepishly admitting that he skipped school on that drizzly Aug 29 morning.
Accompanying him is his mother Yumi, a part-time convenience store worker in her 50s, who drove two hours from their home in Kushiro, in eastern Hokkaido, for the event in the Tokachi region, in the south-east.
I am struck by how their passion for potato chips runs in the family. Mrs Sugawara quips that she “grew up with” Calbee potato chips, which she considers the “ultimate, indispensable comfort food”. She has even tried making her own chips at home, but nothing came close to Calbee in taste.
Keiji Sugawara, 14, and his mother Yumi, a part-time convenience store worker in her 50s, dig out potatoes during an event held by Calbee for fans of its potato chips in Hokkaido’s Tokachi region.
ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM
The mother and son were among 14 pairs of lucky fans to join the Japanese snacks giant at the Hokkaido “fan meeting”, one of the events being held nationwide as Calbee celebrates 50 years of potato chips. Hokkaido is also where the company sources most of its potatoes for its domestic products.
Calbee’s potato chips first hit the shelves on Sept 16, 1975, and today are by far the company’s best-selling product, not only in Japan but also around the world. At least 100 flavours of it are sold in Japan every year, including mainstays and limited-edition and regional specials.
The company is holding a series of events nationwide to celebrate the golden jubilee year of its potato chips, including some that give its most ardent fans a taste of the snack’s journey from farm to packet. Calbee is separately also hosting fan events abroad, including its first Singapore pop-up at Plaza Singapura, which was held in August.
Nowhere is the fan experience, arguably, quite as authentic as in Hokkaido’s Tokachi region, which is home to about 321,000 people and otherwise best-known for its hot springs and pork rice bowls.
For it is in the area’s Memuro Town that is home to Calbee Potato, a subsidiary that works with about 1,600 contract farmers nationwide to ensure a steady supply of spuds, as well as its in-house Potato Research Institute, which develops new potato strains and conducts research in areas such as field irrigation and fertilisers.
In the fiscal year ending March 2025, Calbee procured a staggering 371,000 tonnes of potatoes, or around 19 per cent of all the spuds grown and harvested in Japan.
About 80 per cent of this supply stems from Hokkaido, with 40 per cent of that from the Tokachi region. The remainder is sourced from other parts of Japan, including south-western Kyushu, or imported from the US.
Calbee today boasts a share of over 50 per cent of the Japanese snack market, and is particularly dominant in potato-based snacks, enjoying 75 per cent of the market.
In the last fiscal year, Calbee produced a staggering 920 million packets of chips for domestic consumption – amounting to more than seven bags per resident – with domestic revenues from the potato chips business alone at 102.8 billion yen (S$892 million).
Meanwhile, its overseas products – featuring flavours and brands tailored for local tastes – are made in 12 factories spread across the US, Britain, China, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia. Calbee emphasises that it maintains the same exacting standards for all its products, even as it mainly sources potatoes overseas for its foreign-made products.
“Potato chips are a simple product that requires little more than washing, cutting, frying, and seasoning. This means that their quality is greatly influenced by the potatoes used,” says Calbee Potato general manager Shigeki Kawasaki.
“No matter when or where customers buy them, we must maintain similarly high levels of quality.”
Climate change, however, threatens to cast a pall on the company’s happy milestone. Even Calbee ominously warns as such on its special celebratory portal: “In these unpredictable times of climate change and rising prices, it may one day become difficult to casually enjoy potato chips.”
While Hokkaido has historically been reliable for its cooler summers than elsewhere in Japan, even this is
no longer a given
.
In 2025, Japan’s northernmost island suffered drought-like conditions with low precipitation and scorching temperatures. On July 24, the mercury soared to an all-time high of 38.8 deg C in Obihiro, the Tokachi region’s largest city, the record making national headlines.
Potatoes are sensitive to higher temperatures, which can impair tuber growth and result in smaller, misshapen potatoes that have poor shelf life.
“Thirty years ago, I could count the number of days with temperatures above 30 deg C on one hand. This year, this has happened almost every day since July,” says Mr Toshihito Otani, 48, who leads an association of potato farmers in Memuro, where there are 187 households toiling on 1,034ha of farmland.
Calbee Potato president Kazuya Tasaki apologises for being the bearer of bad news: “While I wish I could report that 2025 is a bumper crop year, it looks like this year would be tough… The potato quality and yield might be affected.”
(From left) Potato farmer Toshihito Otani, Calbee Potato president Kazuya Tasaki, and Calbee Potato Memuro branch manager Hirotaka Taoka pose ahead of a Calbee potato chips fan event on Aug 29 in Hokkaido’s Tokachi region.
ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM
This is now a common story afflicting Japan’s
proud agricultural and fisheries industries
, and threatens to hurt its woeful food self-sufficiency rate of 38 per cent.
Global warming is one hurdle, as are manpower concerns as ageing farmers hang up their shovels.
Japanese producers are thus turning to science and technology, with aquaculture practices increasingly taken up at sea, while on land, new heat- and disease-resistant cultivars of crops like rice and potatoes that can promise higher yields are being developed.
Calbee Potato already has some successes, with poroshiri (“big mountain” in the indigenous Ainu language), which is a pest- and disease-resistant strain, registered in 2017, and yuki-futaba (combining the Japanese words for snow and a term referring to the first two leaves that appear when a plant sprouts) in 2020, which is suitable for long-term storage.
But fresh in Calbee’s memory is the
“potato shock” of 2017
, when a severe shortage of potatoes stopped production lines, with popular products discontinued. The cause: an unprecedented three typhoons that ravaged Hokkaido in August 2016, resulting in a dismal harvest.
That experience exposed the vulnerabilities of Calbee’s supply chains, prompting the company to procure more potatoes from across Japan and abroad, even as imports are subject to strict conditions under Japanese law.
Today, the so-called “potato harvest front” is akin to the “sakura front”, starting from Kyushu in south-west Japan and gradually moving northwards. Harvest season generally runs from September to mid-October in Tokachi.
One year’s worth of potatoes are harvested to cover the production cycle for a year, with the spuds stored in over 40 warehouse facilities in Hokkaido to tide the company over until the harvest starts in Kyushu the following year.
The Calbee Group is now headquartered in Tokyo, but traces its roots back to the Matsuo Food Processing company that was founded on April 30, 1949, in Hiroshima by the late Mr Takashi Matsuo, who died at 91 in 2003.
Mr Matsuo was born in Hiroshima. During World War II, he began making healthy dumplings by extracting nutrients from rice bran – which was usually discarded as waste – and blending them with wild plants.
He set up his namesake company less than four years after his hometown’s devastation from the atomic bomb. Its first product was a confectionery known as Calbee Caramel that proved such a major hit that, in 1955, the firm adopted the name Calbee to reflect a portmanteau of “calcium” and “vitamin B1”.
It then ventured into wheat crackers but scored its first international hit with the kappa ebisen (prawn crackers) that launched in Japan in 1964 and was already being exported two years later. This remains a beloved product worldwide, including in Singapore.
Calbee began exporting the prawn crackers to North America in 1967 and, on a business trip to the US, Mr Matsuo noticed the popularity of potato chips there. This paved the way for domestic development and, in 1975, Calbee’s first potato chips hit the market.
Innovation continued. Back then, all packaging included a transparent film for consumers to see the contents, although this was not ideal to maintain the freshness of potato chips. Calbee endured complaints and opposition to buck the trend, developing an aluminium-based film for packaging that was a first in the industry.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Calbee has identified health foods as a new focus area with services like Body Granola, which has customers testing their intestinal flora to receive a personalised healthy cereal mix developed for them. On Sept 11, it also announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Hodo Inc, a leading US maker of tofu, yuba and other plant-based foods.
But the core business – and biggest money-spinner – still remains potato chips.
On Aug 29, fans like the Sugawaras gathered at Mr Otani’s potato field. His family has supplied Calbee with potatoes for over 40 years, starting from his father’s generation.
Husband and wife Toshiaki and Kumiko Shimomiya, 68 and 65, pose in front of a potato harvester.
ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM
His face might already be known to the most die-hard of supporters. In Japan, each bag of chips comes with a QR code through which curious consumers can trace the origin of their potatoes, right down to the factory and the profiles of farmers whose potatoes are used.
But Mr Otani rarely gets to meet the consumers who eat his produce, and he confesses to feeling “nervous yet grateful” to interact with them as he demonstrated how best to harvest the potatoes.
While participants happily dug out potatoes which they could take home by hand, the harvesting process is automated for contract producers, with Calbee providing them with harvesters to efficiently remove potatoes from the soil.
Calbee also dispatches 40 potato cultivation experts nationwide who work closely with the farmers, tapping artificial intelligence monitoring systems to measure variables such as sunlight, wind, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, and provide data-driven advice.
After getting their hands dirty, the 14 pairs of fans visited one of Calbee’s largest potato storage warehouses out of over 40 facilities across Hokkaido, a cavernous space that can store about 20,000 tonnes of potatoes.
Fans of Calbee potato chips visit an unfilled potato warehouse storage facility in Memuro town of Hokkaido’s Tokachi region on Aug 29. The site is usually kept pitch-dark, as prolonged exposure to light can cause the greening of potatoes. A spotlight was installed for the event.
ST PHOTO: WALTER SIM
These sites are kept pitch-dark, as prolonged exposure to light can cause the greening of potatoes due to the compound solanine, which can be toxic in large quantities. Temperatures are maintained at an optimal 18 to 20 deg C; anything colder and the chips would char too easily.
The fans also got to sample freshly made crisps made on a food truck using potatoes from the day’s harvest.
Although I rarely snack, I accepted when graciously offered a bowl of chips. Despite being unseasoned, the chips were dangerously addictive purely from the natural flavours of the fresh potatoes.
“Calbee may not be based in Hokkaido, but it is a source of pride for us that the company has become so successful with potatoes mostly harvested here,” Sapporo-based salaryman Toshiaki Shimomiya, 68, tells me.
He and his home-maker wife Kumiko, 65, had just posed for photographs in front of a potato harvester.
“Through ups and downs, the snacks have been a constant source of comfort,” says Mr Shimomiya. “And there is always at least one packet of chips in our home.”
AloJapan.com