Japanese retailers collaborate to donate disaster food stockpiles

FamilyMart and Aoyama Trading are expanding their collaborative food drive initiative to the Kanto region, with 85 Yofuku-no-Aoyama stores across five prefectures will donate surplus disaster preparedness food to the Famima Food Drive programme. Their successful pilot in western Japan inspired this partnership in the Kanto area.

Both corporations noticed the issue of food waste generated when companies replace their emergency food stockpiles, and Aoyama Trading delivers their surplus from its retail outlets to nearby FamilyMart stores. These items are then collected by local NPOs and social welfare councils to support residents in need. The current phase involves 85 Yofuku-no-Aoyama locations and 83 FamilyMart stores in Chiba, Saitama, Gunma, Tochigi, and Ibaraki prefectures.

The donation for this period consists of 5,418 items, including 3,612 bags of alpha rice and 1,806 boxes of rice cookies. This expansion follows a 2025 pilot programme involving 41 stores in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions, and the addition of the Kanto region brings the cumulative number of items donated through this partnership exceed 9,000. Local partner organisations from the previous run expressed gratitude for the donations, noting that the rising cost of rice has increased the demand for food support among families with children and welfare facilities.

Michitake Hasebe, Executive Officer at Aoyama Trading, stated that the company is pleased to contribute to food loss reduction and community support through FamilyMart’s infrastructure. The scale of the project has more than doubled since the previous year. Hiroaki Kusama, Executive Officer at FamilyMart, highlighted that the partnership leverages the nationwide networks of both companies to achieve social goals that a single firm could not accomplish alone.