A woman displays pink curry and rice colored by beetroots grown in Tottori Prefecture. Café Oenokian in Tottori also offers a dress rental service to let visitors get dressed in Rococo costumes just like the characters promoting the café
Pink-colored foods, sold by Brilliant Associates, a food processing firm based in the city of Tottori in Tottori Prefecture, are attracting customers at home and abroad.
Pink curry sauce, soy sauce, ketchup and mayonnaise colored by locally-grown red beetroots are gaining popularity as gifts because of their bright color.
As Tottori is known as one of the largest curry sauce consuming prefecture in the nation, the firm developed the curry sauce Pink Karei to attract more visitors to the area. It started serving the curry at Café Oenokian, its restaurant in Tottori. Packaged ready-made curry sauce is also sold at 980 yen.
Brilliant Associates entrusts production of red beetroots, an ingredient to make the products bright pink, to a farm in the town of Yazu, Tottori. Other farms have offered to produce beetroots, according to the firm.
“We hope to spread new recipes (having names) starting with the word pink, and promote the whole region by beetroots,” said Tomiko Fukushima who represents the firm.
After people who bought the products uploaded videos on the Internet, tourists from other countries such as South Korea and Taiwan began visiting the region. The annual sales of the curry sauce and soy sauce total some 100 million yen, and the firm introduced pink mayonnaise and ketchup in December.
The products can be bought at the firm’s website, Tottori’s local specialty shop in Shimbashi, Tokyo, and department stores in Tottori.
(Jan. 21, 2016)