Viewers can learn specific qualities of best rice brands from 47 prefectures at a glance.
TOKYO, Oct. 30 – Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (JA-ZENCHU) launched a new website that introduces best rice brands from all of 47 prefectures of Japan on October 30, 2017. Viewers can search for mostly-recommended rice brands by specific characters such as flavor or stickiness or even the type of dishes with which they go well. The site opened as a part of JA Group website. There are individual pages for each rice brand that contains a radar chart of scores in eight aspects, as well as a positioning map based on the taste. The new website will hopefully help JA-ZENCHU to publicize distinctive qualities of different rice brands and encourage consumers to try different types of rice from all over Japan.
It’s a set of the additional pages to the existing JA Group website named Toretate Daihyakka, which means encyclopedia of freshly-picked vegetables and fruits and is designed to introduce agricultural products in Japan. The rice pages present one rice brand per prefecture selected based on the opinions of a five-star rice meister and an owner of a rice shop in Harajuku, Tokyo, as well as prefectures. JA-ZENCHU intends to add pages for more rice brands in the future.
It also introduces the meaning of brand names, very first stories and distinctive qualities of each brand. The radar charts reflect the judgments of the five-star rice meister, Tadao Koike, who also contributed comments on each rice brand.
Viewers can search for their favorite rice brand by eight distinctive qualities such as appearance, stickiness, and sweetness and also by six types of dishes with which the rice brand goes well. There are notes on how to enjoy rice the most and how to cook and keep them fresh.