Patissier eS Koyama keeps its new chestnut baumkuchen inside a single Takashimaya Nagoya counter

Patissier eS Koyama, the Hyogo-based confectionery house run by chef Susumu Koyama, put a new chestnut baumkuchen on sale exclusively through its satellite shop inside Takashimaya Nagoya on 16 September, the company said in a release published a week later.

The product, called Kin'iro no Kurikinton Baum (golden chestnut-kinton baumkuchen) and billed as the first release in a "Chestnut Study" series, uses steamed chestnuts sourced from the Kuma area of Kumamoto, Ehime and Kochi prefectures, finished with a hazelnut-powder accent, and comes in a box illustrated to trace the chestnut's transformation from raw ingredient to kinton to baumkuchen. It is priced at ¥1,998 for five pieces and ¥3,996 for ten, and is the second Takashimaya-exclusive gift item in the series, after an earlier walnut-and-bran-butter sablé called Nussknacker.

Restricting a new autumn product to a single department-store satellite counter, rather than the brand's own shops or its wider retail network, keeps the launch inside Takashimaya's exclusive-gift programme through the chestnut season, when depachika food halls compete hardest on limited-only confectionery.

The mechanics here are pure department-store Place strategy: a well-known patissier gets a single, geographically restricted point of sale, and Takashimaya gets a genuine exclusive it can use to pull chestnut-season traffic that a national rollout would dilute. Running it as the second instalment of a named series, rather than a one-off, signals that Koyama and Takashimaya intend to keep using the same satellite-shop-only formula through future seasons, a low-risk way for a single department store to keep a well-regarded regional patissier's newest work off its rivals' shelves entirely.