Supplier Selection Criteria at Japan B2B Olive Oil Market and Relation with Preferred Country of Origin

Japan is one of the most important olive oil markets in the world. Despite the importance of this market, there are a few consumer surveys about Japanese market but there isn’t enough study on Japan Business to Business (B2B) olive oil market, as far as we know. In this study, we had focused on B2B olive market of Japan. We aim to understand supplier selection criteria, preferred country of origin, and product attributes as a sub category of supplier selection criteria of the industrial buyers that purchase to resell or to use it as a raw material in their product or service. We had developed a survey by using not only literature but also a lot of interview with experts on this market. We had defined 20 supplier selection criteria about marketing communication, marketing activity, financial advantages, product systems and capacity of company. We take product related supplier selection criteria separately and defined 10 product attribute criteria include, price, quality, taste, package, certification etc. We had added questions about company type, preferred country of origin, and the reason of selecting this country. This survey had applied to olive oil related companies in Japan. Totally 150 companies replied our questionnaire. The questionnaire replies are analyzed by SPSS statistic software. Descriptive results show us which criteria are most important, which countries are most preferred, what are the reasons of selecting these countries. We had also made analyses to find out if there is any relation between these criteria and preferred country or company type. Also we make test to learn if there are any relation between preferred country of origin and the reasons of selecting a specific country. Results are showed that there isn’t any statistically significant relation between country preferences and supplier selection criteria that we had defined. However, at some product related criteria country preference effect the importance of the preferred product attitudes of the companies. For example, it seems price of the product is more important for the industrial buyers that prefer Turkey than the ones that prefer Italy. Quality, taste and organic certification attitudes are also vary depending on country preferences. The analyses results between country type and supplier selection criteria reveal that restaurants’ preferred criteria vary from other types of companies. Regarding product related criteria, there are certain differences on some preferred criteria between distributor, importer and restaurants.