Business
The Next Big Thing?
Tokyo Cafe Serving Noni Drinks Has Global Ambitions
First, Starbucks and other gourmet coffee chains took the world by storm. Now shops serving fancy teas are catching on. But a café featuring drinks and snacks made with noni?
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It may sound unusual, but an outfit in central Tokyo called the Tahitian Noni Café has been tempting the Japanese public with treats like these since mid-March.
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The café is the creation of Tahitian Noni International (www.tahitiannoni.com), the Provo, Utah-based company that began marketing noni juice in 1996 and now sells more than $400 million worth of juice and other products globally each year.
Housed in a highly visible corner building about a 7-minute walk from busy Shinjuku Station, the Tahitian Noni Café serves up a variety of noni-based beverages as well as food.
All of the noni is from Tahiti, which produces fruit that is nutritionally superior to noni grown elsewhere, according to Tahitian Noni International's research.
The most popular items at the café are the Tahitian Noni Power Blender, a smoothie made with noni syrup, frozen yogurt and a choice of toppings, and Noni Twist, a soft frozen dessert.
Other options include noni juice and a tea made from the leaves of the noni tree, or Morinda citrifolia. Served hot or iced, this golden-hued brew incorporates the same technology used to make ocha, or Japanese tea. There are also sandwiches (which don't contain noni) and muffins (which do).
So, just how is the café doing? At the time of this writing, it had been in operation for a little over two months. The company says it has yet to formally tally customer numbers, but judging from the lunch crowd one Monday in mid-May, business isn't bad.
While only about a third of the 40-odd seats were occupied, several people were ordering take-out. The clientele included a trio of women wearing company uniforms, men and women in business suits, casually dressed young adults and a few senior citizens. Seated at one large table were four mothers with their children.
Along with members of the general public, patrons include distributors for Tahitian Noni International, who bring along their own customers. The multilevel marketing company has built a network of more than 150,000 independent sales representatives around Japan since it began doing business here in 1999. It also sells noni products through mail order.
As luck would have it, the four women seated at the table of moms and kids turned out to be distributors. One of them was Sanae Ochitani. She credits noni juice with making her five-year-old child, who is autistic, more responsive to stimulus and less prone to colds. "I haven't changed anything else (in terms of diet), so I can only think it's the noni juice," she says.
While fans like Ochitani believe that noni can alleviate a variety of ailments, Tahitian Noni International makes no such claims, other than to say it supports good health. One reason is that Japanese law is strict about what food companies may say about their products.
The parent company, meanwhile, was the subject of a 1998 investigation in several U.S. states after its distributors allegedly made medicinal claims about noni without Food and Drug Administration approval. The firm admitted no wrongdoing, but paid $100,000 to cover the states' costs.
With such troubles in the past, Tahitian Noni International is now focused on future growth. Its Japanese sales have been rising about 10 percent a year in spite of the weak economy. But noni is still an exotic item in Japan, and the company hopes the café will help it to bring the tropical plant and its fruit to the attention of the general public.
In fact, a spokesman for Tahitian Noni International in Tokyo says the company is already mapping out a possible expansion, though nothing firm is in place. Taking a cue from another pioneer in the café business, the company's idea is to open outlets in other parts of Japan and overseas-"like Starbucks," the spokesman says.
Who knows? If it all works out, some day there could be a Tahitian Noni Café near you.
