For hundreds of years, Japan was a country of tea. Green tea was part of daily life, business meetings, and even religious ceremonies. Coffee was almost unknown outside of a few big cities.

In the 1960s, the Swiss company Nestlé wanted to sell its instant coffee, Nescafé, in Japan. Nestlé already sold instant coffee successfully all over the world. The company believed Japan would be an easy new market.

But Nestlé was wrong. Japanese adults tried the coffee and did not like it. Most people did not buy it again. Nestlé had a serious problem: how do you sell a drink that people don't want?

Prior to the mid-twentieth century, Japan's beverage culture was built almost entirely around green tea — deeply embedded in daily rituals, business etiquette, and formal ceremony. Coffee was a marginal, largely foreign curiosity confined to a handful of Western-style cafés in major cities.

When Nestlé entered the Japanese market in the 1960s with Nescafé, its flagship instant coffee brand, it expected the same success it had achieved in dozens of other countries. Nestlé's global strategy had long relied on introducing instant coffee to markets with an existing coffee-drinking culture and simply making it more convenient.

Japan, however, had no such existing culture to build on. Adult consumers who sampled the product largely rejected it, and Nestlé's initial taste preference research made clear that conventional advertising alone would not be enough to change a national habit.

Why didn't Japanese adults like coffee? The answer is simple: it tasted too bitter to them. People who grow up drinking green tea are not used to strong, bitter flavors like coffee.

Adults also already had strong daily habits. They drank tea every day, at every meal and meeting. It is very difficult to change a habit that people have had for their whole lives.

Nestlé's managers realized something important: advertising alone could not fix this problem. You cannot simply tell adults to enjoy a taste they find unpleasant. The company needed a completely different plan.

Consumer research revealed that the core barrier was not price, availability, or awareness — it was pure sensory rejection. Japanese adults, whose palates had developed around the subtle, mild flavor of green tea, experienced coffee's bitterness as genuinely unpleasant rather than merely unfamiliar.

This was compounded by deep cultural resistance: tea was not simply a beverage choice but an ingrained daily ritual, tied to hospitality, business meetings, and family life. Asking adults to replace it required overcoming decades of established behavior.

Nestlé's marketing team concluded that no advertising campaign, however clever, could override an adult palate that had already been formed. If coffee was going to succeed in Japan, the company would need to change its approach entirely — and change who, exactly, it was trying to persuade.

Nestlé's team had an important idea: adults don't easily change their taste, but children do. A child's taste is still growing and changing. If children could learn to enjoy the taste of coffee while they were young, they might keep drinking it for their whole lives.

This was a completely new strategy. Instead of trying to sell coffee to adults right now, Nestlé decided to think about the future. The company wanted to create coffee drinkers for the next generation.

This meant Nestlé needed patience. The plan would not show fast results. It could take ten or twenty years to succeed. But if it worked, Nestlé would create millions of loyal customers.

Nestlé's breakthrough insight was behavioral rather than technical: while adult taste preferences are largely fixed, children's palates remain highly adaptable. If children could be introduced to coffee flavor early — and in a form they genuinely enjoyed — their adult taste preferences could be shaped well before green tea's cultural dominance became irreversible.

This reframed Nestlé's challenge entirely. Rather than pursuing immediate sales among a resistant adult population, the company committed to a long-term strategy targeting children as the foundation of a future market — accepting that meaningful commercial results might not materialize for a decade or more.

The approach required Nestlé to develop an entirely new category of product: something that introduced coffee's flavor to children gently, using sweetness and familiar formats to build positive associations rather than provoking the same rejection adults had shown.

We use "used to" and "would" to talk about repeated actions or habits in the past that are now different or finished.

• "used to + verb" → a repeated past action or a past state, now changed
  "Japanese consumers used to drink almost only green tea."
• "would + verb" → a repeated past action (not used for states like "have" or "be")
  "Nestlé would give free chocolate-coffee candy to children in schools."
• We do not use "would" for states: say "Coffee used to be rare in Japan" — not "would be rare."

Practice: "Before the 1970s, most Japanese children _____ never tasted coffee."

Both "used to" and "would" describe repeated past actions or habits that no longer happen, but they are not fully interchangeable:

• "used to" can describe both repeated actions and past states.
  "Japan used to have almost no coffee-drinking culture at all."
• "would" can only describe repeated actions, not states — it needs a clear past time context.
  "Throughout the 1970s, Nestlé would distribute chocolate-flavored coffee candy to schoolchildren."
• Combining both in a narrative creates a natural contrast between background state and repeated action: "Children used to associate coffee only with adults; each week, they would receive a small sample designed to taste sweet rather than bitter."

This structure is common in business case studies describing how a market or habit gradually changed over time.

Nestlé created a clever gateway product: chocolate-flavored coffee candy. The candy tasted sweet, like chocolate, but it had a small coffee flavor inside it. Children loved the sweet taste and didn't notice the bitterness.

Nestlé would give this candy to children in schools and at events all across Japan. Over time, children became used to the taste of coffee — without even trying real coffee yet.

As these children grew older, Nestlé also built coffee vending machines on streets and in train stations, selling sweet canned coffee drinks. By the time these children became adults, coffee no longer tasted strange to them — it tasted familiar.

Nestlé's core innovation was a gateway product: chocolate-flavored candy containing a mild coffee taste, distributed widely to schoolchildren throughout the 1970s. The sweetness masked the bitterness that had caused adult rejection, allowing children to build a positive association with coffee flavor from an early age.

This was reinforced through habit formation at scale: repeated, low-cost exposure across schools and public events normalized the flavor for an entire cohort of children, rather than relying on a single advertising push.

As this generation aged, Nestlé complemented the strategy with sweetened canned coffee sold through vending machines — by then a familiar fixture of Japanese urban life — creating a product pathway from childhood candy to adult beverage that carried consumers seamlessly from one life stage into the next.

Nestlé's patient strategy worked. The children who grew up eating chocolate-coffee candy became adults who enjoyed drinking coffee. Japan slowly changed from a nation that used to drink only tea into a nation that also loves coffee.

Today, Japan is one of the biggest coffee markets in the world. There are coffee shops, canned coffee in vending machines, and instant coffee in almost every home. Nescafé became one of the most popular coffee brands in the country.

This story shows that a smart, patient plan — even a very slow one — can completely change how millions of people think, eat, and drink.

Nestlé's decades-long strategy ultimately succeeded on a national scale. The generation raised on chocolate-flavored coffee candy grew into adults with a normalized, positive relationship to coffee flavor — something no advertising campaign aimed at their parents had achieved.

Japan gradually transformed from a market with essentially no coffee culture into one of the largest coffee markets in the world, supporting an extensive café industry, a nationwide canned-coffee vending infrastructure, and strong brand loyalty toward Nescafé specifically, the brand that had cultivated the market from its earliest stages.

The transformation illustrates that market entry into a market with strong existing habits does not always require competing directly with those habits — it can instead mean cultivating an entirely new niche market that expands organically over time.

The story of Nestlé and Japan teaches useful lessons about entering a difficult new market:

• Understand existing habits. Find out what people already do before you try to sell them something new.
• Adults are hard to change. Long habits are difficult to break — think about who is easier to reach.
• Think about the future. Sometimes the best customers are not today's customers, but tomorrow's.
• Be patient. Some of the best business strategies take many years to succeed.
• Start small and sweet. A gentle first product can open the door to bigger success later.

The Nestlé Japan case offers a practical framework for entering markets with deeply established habits:

• Diagnose the real barrier: Nestlé's early failure wasn't a marketing problem — it was a sensory and cultural one. Identifying the true barrier prevented years of wasted advertising spend.
• Target where preferences are still forming: When an existing population's habits are essentially fixed, the more effective strategy may be cultivating the next generation.
• Design a genuine gateway product: The chocolate-coffee candy worked because it was enjoyable in its own right, not simply a smaller version of the eventual product.
• Commit to a long time horizon: Market cultivation strategies require patience and sustained investment well before returns appear.
• Build supporting infrastructure: The vending-machine network ensured the habit, once formed, had somewhere to go as consumers reached adulthood.

• The challenge: Nestlé wanted to sell instant coffee in Japan, a country that used to drink almost only green tea. Adults found coffee too bitter and did not buy it.
• The insight: Adult tastes are hard to change, but children's tastes are still forming — so Nestlé decided to target children instead.
• The strategy: Nestlé created chocolate-flavored coffee candy for children, then later sold sweet canned coffee as those children grew into adults.
• Language focus: "Used to" describes a past habit or state that is now different. "Would" describes a repeated past action.
• The lesson: Patient, long-term strategies can change habits that seem impossible to change quickly.

• Core challenge: Nestlé's instant coffee failed with Japanese adults because of deep cultural resistance and a strong existing tea-drinking habit, not a lack of advertising.
• Key insight: Since adult palates are largely fixed, Nestlé shifted its long-term strategy toward children, whose taste preferences were still forming.
• The strategy: A chocolate-flavored coffee candy gateway product, combined with later canned-coffee vending infrastructure, built a lifelong pathway from childhood exposure to adult consumption.
• Language focus: "Used to" sets up a habitual past state; "would" narrates repeated past actions once that state is established — both are essential for describing gradual cultural change.
• The lesson: Market cultivation — building demand for the next generation rather than persuading the current one — can succeed where conventional advertising cannot.