Shochu can have its ‘mezcal moment’
Japanese spirit shochu needs more marketing support from “deep-pocketed entities” to drive growth and help it achieve its “mezcal moment”.
American-born shochu expert Christopher Pellegrini runs an export business in Japan and an import business in New York for shochu brands. The Japan-based shochu educator has also penned a book on the category, called The Shochu Handbook.
To help drive growth of shochu worldwide, Pellegrini calls for “a lot more support from deep-pocketed entities to help with the marketing of this entirely foreign and new category to the rest of the world”.
He continues: “As soon as you leave Japan, it’s a completely new category. We need more resources to get the word out.”
Pellegrini believes there is a need for more digital marketing and clever campaigns to promote the category, but it suffers from a lack of support from the wider industry.
“People are hesitant to put their money where their mouth is,” he continues. “You can put that right at the Japanese government’s feet because they’ve done a lot to promote sake, but they’ve been a little bit hesitant to go after this potentially much larger fish. There’s more shochu and awamori sold in Japan every year than sake. It’s a bigger part of the economy – it’s kind of weird they haven’t thrown their weight more behind the promotion internationally.
“I think that’s going to change, but it often comes because of the blood, sweat and tears of the little guy who, over 15 to 20 years, is hitting the boots on the pavement and doing the work, and then it can finally get some momentum. That’s when all of a sudden people are like, ‘Oh, this is a safe bet. Now, let’s go for it.’ So I think we’re there right now.”
Pellegrini cites the difficulty of brands securing distribution in the US because of the nation’s complicated three-tier system.
“It’s one thing to get your product into the country through an importer,” he says. “It’s another thing entirely to get a distributor to bring it on, and we’re seeing especially right now, with how market trends are going, a lot of distributors are just shucking and shelling their lowest volume performers. It’s a very difficult situation for a shochu business to confront.”
Follow in sake’s footsteps
Pellegrini points out that the sake industry has “known for decades that they needed to really push international sales and develop new markets”.
He believes this hasn’t been a focus for the shochu sector “until quite recently because sales in Japan were perfectly fine on their own”.
Within the sake industry, he claims there is government assistance and grants to help producers, with prefectures “pooling resources and helping local sake makers to pursue various sales goals intentionally”.
He warns that the shochu industry must “figure out quickly” how it can achieve similar success, adding: “I really believe that shochu can have its mezcal moment.”
Pellegrini is envious of the sake industry, which has “armies of people out there doing events, account activations, and getting the word out in an incredibly effective way”, adding that this is not the case for the shochu industry.
He continues: “I think suppliers need to help support and be more involved, and I would say unabashedly to the shochu and awamori industry – listen, nobody knows what shochu is yet. So let’s not worry so much about our own individual products. Let’s push the entire category for the time being. Ten years from now, you all can fight like cats in a bag over territory, but nobody even knows what shochu is, let alone your specific brand. It really is about reset, resources, time, energy, money – and that’s a big challenge.”
With the exception of Iichiko, one of the category’s biggest-selling brands, Pellegrini believes the other larger distilleries are “dragging their feet”.
He explains: “They’re waiting for there to be a little less risk. I guess that once they start investing in foreign markets, they don’t want it to take 10 years. They want to hit the ground running and they want to be able to see very serious growth within the first couple of cycles that they’re in the market.
“I don’t know if that’s going to be two years from now or 12 years from now, but it would be nice if they entered the game sooner rather than later.”
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