MATHERuBA Café in Kagoshima launches new sweet potato sweets
IMOSUKUI
On September 1, MATHERuBA Café in Haruyamacho, Kagoshima City, started offering a new sweet product IMOSUKUI made with sweet potatoes.
Shigeta Yukari, the manager, and her staff developed the product with the idea of providing a stylish souvenir using sweet potatoes. The dough is a mixture of sweet potatoes grown in Kagoshima, eggs, cream, milk, cane sugar, and vanilla beans. It is then placed in a palm-sized mold and baked in the oven. As a finishing touch, the top is caramelized like a crème brûlée.
The Sweet Potato Brûlée (400 yen) offered at the café has been a popular item, which led to the idea of creating the plain-type IMOSUKUI, made with Anno sweet potato. “We don’t have a product development department as you find in companies, so we worked on the creation of new products while running the café. It took us about a year to perfect it, and we went through a lot of trial and error,” Shigeta recalls.
The packaging features an illustration of sweet potato and a spoon, representing the concept of “eating sweet potatoes with a spoon.” They chose the colors for boxes to match the image of each product: white for the plain Anno Imo, yellow for the Beni-Haruka with bitter chocolate, and light blue for the purple Murasaki Imo with cream cheese. “As you open the box, you will see IMOSUKUI wrapped in a cute film. We want people to enjoy the presentation as well,” said Shigeta. “We would like to see this become a popular souvenir of Kagoshima.”
The price is 432 yen for a single item and 1,296 yen for an assortment of three types. They are available to eat at the café or to go. Customers can also purchase frozen items at the MATHERuBA online store.