Rie Yoshitake
Rie Yoshitake is a London-based business consultant with experience over several decades working with UK and Japanese businesses and markets. As founder of Yoshitake & Associates, she works with a team of specialists to support existing Anglo-Japanese links and promote new ones. She has been promoting sake and Japanese food for many years, and has been recognised by the Japanese Government with the Foreign Minister’s Commendation (2019) and the Minister’s Award for Overseas Promotion of Japanese Food (2014, MAFF).
After studying international marketing and public relations in London, Rie became sole UK representative for a Japanese trading company, spending ten years overseeing their London operations, working across a range of markets focusing particularly on luxury goods and fine wine. In 2001 Rie became a founding partner of Claret Co. Ltd., which imports fine and rare wines to Japan. Bringing together her love of wine and her wish to support business and cultural links between Japan and Britain, Rie became involved in promoting Japan’s sake industry overseas. In 2007 the Japan Sake Brewers Association Junior Council, also known as Sake Samurai, invited her to become their UK Representative. Since 2015, she has also been the UK Representative of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association.
Rie grew up in Munakata, a coastal city in Fukuoka said to be the starting point of overseas Japanese trade, and ascribes her love of travel and desire to create strong international connections in part to this background.