About Us

Sheep Impact is a British Food import company. It is run by two people, Matthew and Hidemi. We are a small, family-run business based in the city of Morioka in Iwate prefecture, Japan. We come from different professional backgrounds – 13 years of inbound Japan travel industry and 13 years of Japanese early education.

Our story

In a freezing cold and snowy December in 2007 in Hanamaki, Iwate prefecture, I was sat under my kotatsu in my ‘house’, in the single tatami room that I had prepared for the long winter. It was Christmas season.

As much as I was enjoying being in Japan for nearly 5 months, I longed for comfort food at Christmas time, and it was almost impossible to find the foodstuffs that I would normally buy around this time of year.

“Surely, Japan must have foreign food that you can buy”, I thought to myself. After scouring the internet, and some import stores in Morioka (and Tokyo), it became clear very quickly that there was no single source of foreign food store, that sold exclusively British foods.

After moving back to London in 2010, I met my wife Hidemi at the London 2012 Olympics. We moved back to Azabu-Juban, Tokyo in 2015, but even with the plethora of international food stores in our neighbourhood, there were still no shops that sold exclusively British foods. Annual visits to the UK always involved a suitcase full of supermarket goods.

During 2020 and the covid shutdown, we decided to revisit the idea of moving to Morioka, Iwate prefecture to start our own adventure. In April 2023, we finally moved!

So in March 2024, some 16 years later after that very first freezing cold winter in Hanamaki, Iwate, a long-held dream of ours has come to fruition – to be an import store, dedicated exclusively to the selling and stocking off British foodstuffs, whilst being involved at the heart of our local community.

We’re pleased you’re here, too.

Welcome.