Snacks, Drinks and Fandom: How Japanese Food Brands Run Package Collabs and Receipt-Entry Campaigns

Food and beverage makers run oshi-katsu programs such as character packaging and campaigns where buying eligible products earns goods. Because the products are ones fans already buy every day, the program gives them a reason to put one more item in the basket.

Even at an easy price, how a program lands depends on bonus stock and the conditions for getting one. Using cases from food and beverage makers, we sort out how they sell and what to watch for in running them.

Food and Drink Collabs Fall Into Three Types

Line up the cases and the programs sort into three.

Behind all this is the growth of the oshi-katsu market itself. A column from the General Policy Division of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, “Oshi-Katsu: A Form of Consumption Growing Fast Among the Young” (Economic Trend 137, 2025) (in Japanese), cites Yano Research Institute’s estimate that the market for 16 main “otaku” categories grew about 50% from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2024. The same column draws on a Cross Marketing survey: 20% of people overall do oshi-katsu in their leisure time, as do 45% of women in their 20s and 29% of men in their 20s.

Still, there is no official statistic for the oshi-katsu market in food and beverages alone. In an annual spending survey (in Japanese) that Favomatch ran in December 2024 with 183 women aged 18 or over who were doing oshi-katsu, the average came to about ¥400,000 a year, with about ¥180,000 going to live-event costs and about ¥170,000 to goods. The breakdown for food and snacks wasn’t disclosed. That gap is itself a sign that programs in this area have only ever been judged by “shelf sales.”

Four Cases From Autumn 2025 to Summer 2026

Calbee’s Jagarico Oshi-Katsu Packaging (Round 3 of Its Logo-Change Series)

• Aim: Capture the broad base of oshi-katsu fans themselves, without depending on a specific franchise
• What they did: From early May 2026, Calbee’s potato-stick snack Jagarico switched over nationwide in stages. There were logo-changed packages with eight words by flavor, such as “Oshikatsu,” “Sukisugite” (“I love them too much”) and “Meroi,” and six lids where fans can write their oshi’s name or a message. The dedicated site “Jagarico Maker” was also substantially renewed (Calbee press release, in Japanese)
• Result: Two prize campaigns ran. The first gave 200 winners two clear cards and a 14-color penlight (deadline May 10), and the second gave 100 winners a case of Jagarico Salad (June 8-14)
• The Lab’s take: The point isn’t the artwork but the blank space on the lid. Put a franchise on a pack and only that franchise’s fans can buy it, but leave room to write and fans of every genre can fill in their own oshi. That the logo-change series has reached a third round is proof in itself that a packaging campaign without license fees can work

Morinaga Milk Industry x Sanrio Characters

• Aim: Turn the anniversaries of its own brands into buzz with the power of characters
• What they did: For purchases from October 1 to November 30, 2025, Morinaga ran the “Anniversary Campaign: Celebrate With Collab Packages!” Philadelphia cream cheese (55th anniversary) and Kraft Kirete-ru Cheese (35th) got limited-quantity packages featuring Sanrio’s Cinnamoroll, My Melody, Pompompurin, Hello Kitty and Pochacco (Morinaga Milk Industry news release, in Japanese)
• Result: A prize drawing ran alongside, with 300 winners in total receiving items such as fluffy plushies
• The Lab’s take: An anniversary is a big event inside a company, but to consumers it’s someone else’s birthday. Put a character there and a reason to celebrate together appears for the first time. Anniversaries pair well with character collabs because half of what’s being celebrated can pass from the brand to the character

Suntory x Pokemon 30th Anniversary

• Aim: Turn the purchase of a drink into the doorway to a digital entry
• What they did: From April 27, 2026, Suntory ran a campaign with prizes such as multifunction backpacks themed on the Grass, Fire, Water and Electric types, and partner towels. Entry was by sending your receipt through the messaging app LINE. The concentrated home drink “Ouchi Drink Bar” also released a set with random rubber coasters of all four past partner Pokemon (Famitsu.com, in Japanese)
• The Lab’s take: The prizes matter less than the path to them. Sending a receipt by LINE lowers the barrier to entering and leaves the company with a channel connected directly to buyers. A relationship that used to end at the shelf now continues after the campaign, which is the decisive difference from entering by postcard

Kuriyama Beika’s “Setoshio” x Pompompurin

• Aim: Match a product to the “season” of the franchise’s annual event
• What they did: Pompompurin took first place in the 2026 Sanrio Character Ranking, and to mark it Kuriyama Beika (maker of the Befco rice-cracker line) released “2026 Sanrio Characters Setoshio” for a limited time from August 17, 2026, at supermarkets, drugstores and its official online shop nationwide. The individually wrapped pieces come in 10 designs featuring Pompompurin and his “Team Purin” friends (Sanrio official news, Befco / Kuriyama Beika, both in Japanese)
• The Lab’s take: The design rides the announcement of the ranking results, a topic that comes around every year. If you know the rights holder’s annual calendar, you don’t have to create a topic; you only have to be ready in time for one. And because the randomness of 10 wrapped designs is contained within a single bag, it is less exposed to the headwinds against random goods

Purchase-bonus programs have kept running since autumn 2025, too. Lotte’s Sou ice cream, for example, teamed up with My Hero Academia and gave out an A5 notebook for buying two.

A Past Example: Bikkuriman and the “Bonus Is the Product” Structure

The prototype of the food collab goes back to 1985. Lotte’s wafer chocolate Bikkuriman Chocolate became a social phenomenon with its “Devils vs. Angels” series, released that year. Huge amounts of the chocolate inside were thrown away by people who only wanted the popular stickers, some stores began limiting purchases to three per person, and in 1988 the Fair Trade Commission is said to have stepped in with guidance because of how overheated it had become.

That was 40 years ago, but the structure is the same today. The moment the bonus outweighs the contents, the most rational thing a consumer can do is buy without eating. Designing a bonus also means designing so that food stays food.

Patterns That Work and Patterns to Watch

The right-hand column lists operational problems to prepare for at the planning stage. The metrics that measure results, in particular, need to be settled before launch. If you can compare sales of the eligible product and the number of entries, you have material to improve the next program.

For Company Planners: Steps to Design a Food Collab

1. Decide which type to compete with first. Package change, purchase bonus and oshi-katsu theme each need different preparation time and a different internal owner. Try to do them all and the announcements fall apart
2. Set the purchase hurdle at around two. One isn’t enough motive, and too many make people drop out. That cases cluster at “buy two” is accumulated rule of thumb
3. Secure the rights holder’s annual schedule first. Annual events like a character ranking, a work’s anniversary, an anime’s broadcast period: to be in time for the season, you have to work backward
4. Split products and bonuses by distribution channel. Convenience-store exclusives, supermarket distribution, limited quantities online. Spread out stock and buzz, and decide it together with the production plan
5. Design digital entry together with a personal information policy. Sending receipts through LINE gets you customer data, but that presupposes stating the scope collected and the purpose of use
6. Always check “can they finish it?” At the planning stage, confirm that the condition for getting the bonus doesn’t push excessive buying, and that the amount is one a person can realistically consume
7. Fix the success metrics before launch. POS for the eligible product, entries, social mentions, and a comparison with non-eligible products. Metrics decided after the fact always drift toward good numbers

Notes From The Oshi Lab: A ¥150 Oshi-Katsu Reaches the Furthest

It’s a mistake to see food and beverage collabs as small in effect because the unit price is low. It’s the opposite: this sales floor is the lowest-threshold entrance to oshi-katsu. People who can’t get to a live show, people who can’t put tens of thousands of yen into goods, people who don’t think of themselves as doing oshi-katsu at all can buy two convenience-store ice creams today. Gen Z oshi-katsu spending shows the same thing: oshi-katsu was a chain of actions that included watching, making and sharing, not only buying. A ¥150 product can be the first step in that chain.

At the same time, this sales floor carries a responsibility specific to food. What remains as inventory when it’s goods becomes waste when it’s food. The lesson of Bikkuriman was not “weaken the bonus” but “keep the contents strong enough to stand as the purpose.” Jagarico’s logo-change packaging series has reached a third round not only because the lid has blank space, but because Jagarico keeps being bought as Jagarico.

The longer a program runs, the more we want to look back not just at sales but at whether fans could take part without strain. Carry the ease of choosing eligible products, stock levels and clarity of entry into the next round, and a one-off promotion can turn into lasting relationship-building. You’re borrowing not shelf space but a relationship with fans. We believe that awareness is the foundation for growing food and oshi-katsu programs.

Related articles: What Is Oshi-Katsu Marketing? / Gen Z Oshi-Katsu Spending / What Is Fan Marketing? / What Are Random Goods?