Good things take time, but three decades is a long time to wait for a piece of meat. However, that’s exactly how long it takes to receive an order of Kobe beef croquettes from one famous butcher in Japan.
The frozen croquettes come from Asahiya, a family-run butcher shop in Takasago City in Western Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture. Anyone planning on serving their Extreme Croquettes for a meal in the year 2052 better order them now to get them in time, as orders take 30 years to complete.
The butcher shop was founded in 1926, selling meat products from Hyogo prefecture for decades before adding beef croquettes. Then, in the early 2000s, the dish became an internet sensation, which has pushed wait times out to 30 years, according to a report from CNN.
Shigeru Nitta is the third generation of his family to own the butcher shop, and he shared with CNN that they first started selling their products online in 1999, offering the “Extreme Croquettes as a trial.”
The butcher shop now sells four types of Kobe beef croquettes, and while the Extreme Croquettes carry a three-decade wait list, shoppers can wait a much shorter span of four years for the shop’s Premier Kobe Beef Croquettes.
Nitta had taken over the business from his father in 1994, and with new ownership came new experiences as he had experimented with e-commerce. When he brought it to the butcher shop, he found that people wouldn’t pay big for prime beef online, so he decided to sell it for nearly a dollar less than the meat cost.
"We made affordable and tasty croquettes that demonstrate the concept of our shop as a strategy to have customers enjoy the croquettes and then hope that they would buy our Kobe beef after the first try," Nitta told CNN.
The cheap price tag and high quality of the Extreme Croquettes quickly gained steam, resulting in the butcher receiving media attention in the early 2000s, causing a boom for the product that has not cooled since.
"We stopped selling them in 2016 because the waiting time became over 14 years. We were thinking of stopping orders, but we got many calls requesting to keep offering them," Nitta said.
Then in 2017, Asahiya began taking orders for the croquettes again at a higher price, but still below the cost of the beef. Boxes of Extreme Croquettes, which come with five pieces, now sell for $18.40.
While the wait times for the croquettes are long, Nitta says that if he speeds up the process, he could risk bankrupting the shop.
"We hear that we should hire more people and make croquettes more quickly, but I think there is no shop owner who hires employees and produce more to make more deficit,” Nitta said. “I feel sorry for having them wait. I do want to make croquettes quickly and send them as soon as possible, but if I do, the shop will go bankrupt.”
Those looking to get a taste of the Kobe beef croquettes can place their order on the butcher shop’s website.
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