I’m not built for the cold. Anything under 25ºC (Fahrenheit is not a real thing - fight me) and the woolens come out. The temperature in Japan was in single digits. I walked into a FamilyMart for a hot coffee in the morning and watched in morbid horror as people walked up to the chilled sections and picked up drinks. It took a week for me to learn that the “chilled” section they were picking up drinks from is actually a “heated” section. It keeps drinks hot! Granted, these are RTDs in plastic bottles and I get my daily recommended dose of microplastics from other sources, but still, it was a revelation. These heated aisles come out in the winter and disappear as things get warmer. I’ve never seen such a thing anywhere else, and I can’t get over it.

Japan has one of the most fascinating retail food landscapes in the world. If you really want to understand how this country eats, shops, and thinks about food, forget the fancy department and specialty stores for a moment. The real action is in the konbini or convenience stores.

They are so embedded in Japanese daily life that they've become their own category of tourism. Konbini tourism is a thing now. People travel to Japan to specifically pay homage to these stores. 

One of the best things about having access to a network of food and drink experts around the world is that occasionally, work looks like this: a Saturday morning in Tokyo, the day after Foodex Japan, wandering through some of the most meticulously designed retail spaces on the planet with someone who knows exactly what they’re looking at.

That someone is Marc Matsumoto, culinary specialist and GourmetPro expert, whose knowledge of Japanese food culture is endless. We spent several hours across three konbini and a handful of supermarkets. I am now in possession of a ton of shaky, furtive, shot-from-the-hip footage, because you’re technically not supposed to film inside these stores, and I am still on a steep learning curve with a camera (I was asked if I had a nostril fetish at one point). It’s really bad cinéma vérité, just with better snacks and some killer insights.

At some point, I just stopped being surprised and let the revelation wash over me that Japan will take any concept as far as it can possibly go, and then a little further.

The gummy section alone is insane. We’ve done an in-depth piece on Japan’s confectionery and the textures that drive it, with Marc again. But Ninja Messi cracked me up. It means “food for ninjas” and has a salaryman in a business suit on the front and is explicitly marketed to men on the premise that it improves your jawline. A version of this is the Tough Gummy. This is a looksmaxxer’s paradise.

Then there's the Napolitan, spaghetti with ketchup, sometimes with added sugar, that would make the Italians weep but is deeply nostalgic comfort food here. “It reminds people of their mom's home cooking,” Marc said. He also said that his mom never made this and he doesn’t really get the appeal.

Calpis is a yogurt-flavored drink with no actual yogurt or probiotics (which is why it’s not with the Yakults), but it has been very popular for decades. It’s just yogurt-flavored, which is a head-scratcher, but it is popular in many places in Asia. In the US, they renamed the brand Calpico because it was felt it sounded like “cow piss”.  

Someone briefly sold drinkable mapo tofu in a cup, that could be consumed hot or cold. It's gone now, since it was a limited edition, which is honestly the most Japanese thing about it. The willingness to launch something completely unhinged, watch what happens, and move on without embarrassment is baked into how this market works.

Japan produces an almost comical volume of limited edition and seasonal products because novelty is the point. Try it, run it for a season, retire it, try something else. The rest of the world spends months in product development meetings asking “but will people buy this?” Japan asks “why not?” and finds out in real time. This is also possible because of the fantastically precise retail infrastructure that most other countries don’t have. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere about the freedom that comes from not being embarrassed by your own ideas.

Some candy companies take this attitude to the next level. They’ve released fish-flavored candy for Cat Day, marketed to humans, with a “please do not feed this to your cat” on the packaging. Here’s an example from over a decade ago that is a shiojake-flavored (salt-grilled salmon) gummy candy. This has been going on for a while.

The chocolate calendar in Japan is basically a climate diary. Soft, luxurious chocolates dominate from winter right through to White Day in mid-March. Once White Day passes, the format shifts entirely to baked chocolate. Because historically, Japan's heat and humidity made them physically unsellable in summer. This is a pretty cool thing that companies in hot countries with questionable cold chains should look into. 

White Day, if you're not familiar: Valentine's Day in Japan is where women give men chocolate. A woman once wrote to a magazine complaining that men never gave anything back, and a confectionery company in Fukuoka read the letter, invented a holiday on March 14, and called it Marshmallow Day. The marshmallow industry essentially lobbied a national gift-giving occasion into existence. It was later renamed White Day, hence the white chocolate everywhere. We were doing the store hopping on March 14, so we caught some of these examples before the baked goods moved in.

The alcohol aisle alone could fuel a dissertation on how a society quietly changes its mind about drinking. The category to watch is chu-hai, which is shochu mixed with a carbonated drink (Japan’s answer to the hard seltzer, except it was first). The Strong Zero, a 9% ABV version, became famous, then quickly infamous. 

Japan has no open container law, so drinking on the street is completely legal and extremely common. Young people were getting drunk in public, causing scenes, and the blame landed on Strong Zero. Not entirely fair, but it was a convenient villain. It went away and crept back, chastened but not defeated. Meanwhile the market moved on. Suntory's Horoyoi has 3% ABV, is gentle, and practically a soft drink. And it’s now outselling the strong stuff as young Japanese drink less. The “Strongs” also have been relegated to the bottom of the shelf.

And then there are the liver protection drinks, consumed before a night out on the entirely logical premise that you should pre-treat your liver rather than apologize to it afterward. I was assured they taste genuinely terrible. I was also assured they kinda work. There is no Western equivalent of this category. One culture accepts hangovers as consequences. The other puts the solution at the door on your way out.

Historically, blue is considered an appetite-killing color in Japan. You don’t see blue food in Japan because culturally it signals something is wrong with what you’re about to eat. Then younger Japanese consumers decided, via social media, that blue equals happiness. A bunch of brands responded immediately: blue bread, blue ramen, blue potato chips, the whole shebang. By the time we visited, the campaign was over. But there were a few stragglers still on shelves.

There are three major convenience store chains in Japan: 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, and Lawson. Together they account for 96% of the market. Everything else (and there are a few) makes up the remaining 4% and mostly keeps to train stations and regional outposts. 

There are more than 56,000 convenience store locations across Japan. That's around 1 store for every 2,200 people. You can walk a single neighbourhood and pass multiple FamilyMarts within a hundred meters of each other. Total annual sales from convenience stores for 2025 was US$75.8 billion (JPY12 trillion). They account for 15-20% of all grocery sales in the country, and that's before you count prepared food. 1 in 5 grocery dollars in Japan goes through a convenience store.

Each store is split roughly into thirds: ready-to-eat foods, packaged foods, toiletries and sundries. Prepared food deliveries arrive 3-5 times a day, with inventory rotating by time: breakfast in the morning, lunch at midday, snacks in the afternoon. If the shelves look sparse, it’s got nothing to do with supply crunches. It’s just the end of a cycle.

7-Eleven, FamilyMart, and Lawson are not three versions of the same store. They each target completely different people, with different products, different pricing, and different cultural energy. The overlap is mostly just the format. And even that changes depending on where the store is.

The egg sandwich tells you everything you need to know. Marc bought the egg salad sandwich from all three chains, scraped out the filling, weighed everything separately, cross-referenced the nutritional information, and calculated the actual egg content in each one. 

FamilyMart clusters near train stations, and has smaller stores, shelves going vertical because there’s not much room to spread out. The target is younger, more price-sensitive customers who want bold flavor and cultural cachet. The egg sandwich is an indicator, as is the Spam onigiri. 

Spam has an association with Okinawa, where the American military presence created an appetite for it that spread culturally. “It has this kind of cool American association,” Marc said. Around the world, Spam was maligned for a while (hence spam mail) but now a can of spam is like US$10. It's become a luxury item, he added. The Spam onigiri here is clearly aimed at younger customers. “There are no old people buying these.”

7-Eleven goes the other direction: into the suburbs, with bigger stores, catering to older demographics. Marc told us about the one near his home that used to be a supermarket. The owners took the 7-Eleven franchise but kept their existing customer base, which means it still stocks rice, fresh produce, things you'd actually cook with. 

7-Eleven is reportedly strict about branding and store standards, but out in the suburbs, local reality has a way of leaking through. Some locations have entire wagashi sections, Japanese traditional confectionery, like mochi, yomogi mochi with mugwort kneaded into the rice cake. “You don’t see much mochi at the other ones because they’re catering to younger people. And if they do have it, it’s modern wagashi, with whipped cream inside or something. Here it's much more traditional because that's who's coming.”

Lawson is rarer on the street, and that's partly by design. Lawson isn't trying to be everywhere. It's trying to be the right store for a specific demographic: younger working people (particularly women), employed, health-conscious, with opinions about food quality. This is seen in their product philosophy. They even created a sub-brand of stores called Natural Lawson, with better-for-you, clean foods, developed entirely by an all-female team. The standalone stores have mostly closed, but the maroon branding now lives as a dedicated shelf section inside every regular Lawson.

FamilyMart treats them as a core business model: pop stars, YouTubers, anime characters, chefs, athletes. Shohei Ohtani was fronting a campaign when we were there. They run lotteries where a character-branded gift turns up inside your purchase, and those get expensive when a popular name is attached. 

Then there's the merchandise: FamilyMart made branded retro tennis socks in their blue and green colors that blew up on TikTok a couple of years ago, and now every konbini has their own version. They even have a collaboration with Imabari, a region on Shikoku island famous for exceptionally high-quality towels. A convenience store, selling premium artisan towels.

A recent collaboration is with Black Thunder, a chocolate bar from Hokkaido built around Oreo-style cookie crumbs that make a crunchy, thunderous sound when you bite it. It started as omiyage, the food souvenir you’re socially obligated to bring back when you travel anywhere in Japan. Black Thunder was what you brought back from Hokkaido. Then it became a national brand. Now it has its own FamilyMart range spanning breads, sweets, and refrigerated products, plus regional exclusives across Japan. The path from regional souvenir to national brand, played out on a convenience store shelf, is a fascinating case study in Japanese food retail.

In 7-Eleven, the ramen section had restaurant collaborations with chef photos on the packaging, regional styles from specific restaurants. The frozen pizza Marc picked up was from an acclaimed restaurant. “Some of the best pizza restaurants in the world are in Japan,” he said. 

Lawson drills deep on seasonal craft collaborations. When we were there, the refrigerated sweets section had been handed over to Ichibiko, a bakery specializing in strawberry shortcakes and cream puffs from a prefecture up north. 

They also had this special collaboration with a famous Osaka okonomiyaki restaurant called Yukari. This particular signature product was made under the supervision of the restaurant.

The seasons in Japan move 2-3 months ahead of the actual calendar. “Spring products started coming out in late December, early January,” Marc said. By mid-March, summer cold noodles were already appearing on shelves. Lawson is one of the more aggressive movers in this direction, but all three chains operate this way.

The bento section at Lawson rotates weekly and seasonally. “There are new bentos every week. You could eat here a couple of times a week and never get bored because there’s always going to be something new.” He paused. “On the flip side, if you find something you like, it’s not going to be there. There’s no guarantee.”

This relentless rotation is also why product velocity numbers are so staggering. 7-Eleven launches around 120 new products every Tuesday. FamilyMart does around 60. Lawson does 20 to 30. It’s not a perfectly clean comparison: 7-Eleven counts everything including products that appear in supermarkets, while the other two count only their exclusives. But the direction is the same across all three. 

Today’s piece is already twice as long as our usual Market Shake, and I want you to know it took genuine restraint to get here. There were two longer versions before this one. I had to be physically stopped. There is a lot more where this came from. Marc's knowledge of this market has no visible bottom, and we barely scratched the surface of what we saw that morning. If something here sparked a question, or you want to go deeper on any of it – the chains, the categories, more kooky products, any of it – check out the link below.

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