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Bento&co | The Bento Shop - About Us

About Us


Bento&co is a company dedicated to bringing you the best bento boxes and bento related accessories, such as chopsticks, napkins and more, directly from Japan. Based in the old Imperial Japanese Capital of Kyoto, Japan, Bento&co was launched in November 2008 by the husband-and-wife team of Thomas and Erico Bertrand. The company is now thriving, with 7 full time employees! 


About our team 

Thomas is originally from France and has been living in Kyoto since 2003. He originally intended to stay for a year, which then turned into two, and now it’s 2010 and he still hasn’t gotten tired of living in this beautiful, historic city and the Kamo River. He has a personal website (French) called la rivière aux canards

Erico is a born and bred in Kyoto. She is in charge of product procurement, communicating with bento box manufacturers and craftsmen, and day-to-day bookkeeping for Bento&co. Since the company took off, she has had little time to actually make bentos, but loves to see the photos of bentos taken by Bento&co's customers.   

Okada-san is a Japanese francophile, who takes care of our stock and also helps with shipments. 
Itakura-san verifies the contents of all the boxes going out to our customers before they're tapes up and shipped!
Akiko-san the stepsister who loves numbers and accounting. 
Melodie also originally from France,  supports the wholesale orders and answers to your questions.
Brett is a long-time Kyoto resident from the US and does creative marking for the company.


Our experience as a company

Since Bento&co opened for business, we have shipped out more than 30,000 orders to customers worldwide. Everything is done from our offices here in Kyoto, Japan, from processing orders, packing up boxes and putting them in the delivery vans. 

We started out by checking orders from a laptop sitting on the sofa, and packing up boxes on our living room coffee table. We've grown a bit since then, but we haven't forgotten that we are in this business to give personalized and attentive service to each and every one of our customers. All of your orders processed within hours of receiving them. Your packages are prepared in 2 stages, and verified by at least 2 members of our staff before they go out. This way, we keep errors down to a minimum. 

Bento&co is a small family business, but we are proud to be associated with many large and reputable companies, who have put their trust in us. Of all the companies we are associated with, there are two, in particular, that we would like to tell you about: 

    FedEx has gone out of their way to make our shipments go out as fast and smoothly as possible. We're one of their best customers in the Kyoto area! The FedEx boss in charge of the Asia-Pacific region even visited our humble offices recently. 

    Hakoya, the largest manufacturer of bento boxes in Japan and worldwide, has chosen us as their exclusive international wholesale agent. If you have a business outside of Japan and are interested in Hakoya products, please contact@bentoandco.com. We're honored to represent a company that is so dedicated to quality!


Our site

Our site is hosted by Shopify, a simple and secure solution for starting online stores.

Credit card payments are processed via PayPal. This is a safe and quick method for both you, our customers, and us. 


Privacy Policy

Any personal information we request from you is used solely for the purpose of getting your order to you safely and quickly! Furthermore, we never see any of your financial information, since all financial transactions are handled by PayPal. 

We never sell or exchange any customer information with any third party. We hate spam as much as you do! 


Credits 

Site design by Axome. Development by les sushi codeurs


Copyright Notice 

All the images on this site belong to Bento&co and cannot be used for commercial purposes. However, you are welcome to use them to generate a buzz about us on your blog or if you want to use them as a screen background, just ask! 


Go to Terms and Conditions of Sale.

For shipping information, go to the Shipping and Delivery page.