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Three Days of Food Innovation & Discovery in Tokyo: Scenes From SKS Japan 2024

In January of 2017, little did I know that a chance meeting in the Venetian in Las Vegas would eventually lead to the creation of Japan’s most influential and well-attended food tech event.

We’d just come off our second North America Smart Kitchen Summit a couple of months prior, and two first-time attendees who had made the trip to Seattle, Hirotaka Tanaka and Akiko Okada, asked if we could meet during CES.

I said yes, and the rest is history. Half a year later, we got together in Tokyo for the first-ever SKS Japan, and I was wonderfully surprised at the excitement and innovation around the food system taking place in this beautiful country. And now, seven years later, we just had the seventh SKS Japan, and it’s incredible how this show has matured into one of the most important food tech events on the calendar.

This year’s event spanned three days and brought in over one hundred speakers from across the globe and the food system. Below are some snapshots from the show.

Above: Myself and Hiro Tanaka giving the opening keynote to kick of SKS Japan 2024 (and announce SKS 2025 dates).

Above: Robin Liss (Suvie), Kevin Yu (SideChef) and Assaf Pashut (Chefee) join me for a conversation about how the consumer kitchen has evolved over the past decade and where it will go over the next ten years.

Above: Jasmin Hume (Shiru) joins me on stage and Adam Yee (Sobo Foods) and Tarini Naravane (Grainge AI) dial in to talk about the impact of AI on developing new food inputs and products.

Above: Lee Kindell, the founder of MOTO Pizza, comes to Japan from Seattle to talk about his fast-growing restaurant and how he leverages technology such as robotics to help “scale craft”.

Above: Author and Wired’s kitchen tech reviewer Joe Ray sits for a fireside chat on his thoughts about food tech journalism and first impressions of Japan’s food and restaurant scene.

Above: A talk about new approaches using upcycling and food life extension technologies with Moody Soliman (Ryp Labs), Daichi Takada (AlgaleX Co.), and Lina Sakai (Fermenstation).

Above: Akiko Okada (UnlocX), Hirotaka Tanaka (UnlocX), Michiaki Matsushima (WIRED JAPAN), Hiroki Nakajima (University of Tokyo) during a session entitled Tokyo Regenerative Food Lab in Action

Above: The SKS Japan exhibition space. Bottom right is demo table for AlgaleX’s upcycled algae protein product line, Umamo.

Above: Exhibitors head out to the streets of Tokyo for a street fair on the final day of SKS Japan to share their innovations with a wider audience.

Adam Yee Makes Us Dumplings and Talks About Building His Startup at SKS Japan

Ever since longtime food entrepreneur and podcaster Adam Yee announced his new better-for-you dumpling brand Sobo Foods, I’d been hoping to head to California to try the tasty-looking Asian comfort food.

But as it turns out, I won’t have to make that trip to the Bay area to sample his curry potato and the plant-based pork and chive dumplings since I had a chance to taste some cooked up by Yee himself in Tokyo. Yee was in town for SKS Japan, the global food tech summit hosted by The Spoon and SigmaXYZ, to speak on a session and hand out dumplings to curious event attendees.

Above: Yee at SKS Japan

It was Yee’s first time at the event after trying to get in last year and (as you’ll hear in the interview) getting COVID in Cambodia. I’m glad he made it because, well, dumplings, and also, he’s got some great insights into the broader food tech scene. We discuss why Yee and his cofounder started Sobo, the company’s go-to-market strategy, and more. Click play below to listen to Adam and my conversation and below and stay tuned for more interviews from SKS Japan this week and next.

A Conversation with Adam Yee about his new Sobo Foods, a better-for-you Asian comfort food brand.

Japan Vertical Farm Pioneer Spread Hits 100 Million Lettuce Serving Milestone

While the vertical farming industry in the US continues to struggle, longtime Japanese precision agriculture pioneer Spread continues to pump out heads of lettuce in its fifteen years in operation, hitting the 100 million pack milestone this year. The company, which raised $30 million in funding last year, sells its produce in approximately 5,000 retail stores, as well as food service and ready-made meal operators across Japan, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

The company’s founder, Shinji Inada, started the company in 2007 after a career in fresh produce distribution, citing a concern about a decrease in agriculture production due to climate change. While vertical farming has been around in Japan since the 1980s, Inada noticed that neither the quality nor price of “plant factory” produce was on par with traditionally farmed agriculture, so he developed a vertical farm system to produce his lettuce brand called Vegetus.

Since then, his company has continued developing its vertical farming technology and launched its Techno Farm concept in 2018, which uses automated cultivation, precise environmental control technology, and an IoT-based cultivation management system called ‘Techno Farm Cloud.’ The company’s TechoFarm system is used in three locations today: Techno Farm Fukuroi, Techno Farm Narita, and Techno Farm Keihanna.

Since its fundraise last year, the company has been exploring expansion into strawberries and the production of plant-based meat. The company has also been expanding its selection of lettuce varieties, launching a ” Chigiri ” product in 2021, which has its leaves removed during production, and launching a new European lettuce variety, “Stick,” this spring.

Japanese Academic and Corporate Partners Launch Cultivated Meat Consortium

This week, a group of Japanese academic and corporate partners announced the creation of the Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat, a new group that aims to promote “concrete efforts for social implementation of edible cultured meat manufacturing technology using 3D bioprinting.”

The group, which includes the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Shimadzu Corporation, Itoham Yonekyu Holdings Inc., Toppan Printing Co., Ltd, Inc., and SIGMAXYZ Inc., stated it will focus on the development and application of 3D bioprinting technology, the establishment of a consistent value chain from production to distribution, and the contribution to the establishment of laws and regulations through cooperation with government agencies and private companies.

In August 2021, Osaka University and Toppan Printing published a paper outlining the technology for 3D printing fibrous tissues, such as muscle, fat, and blood vessels. The group’s efforts will be centered around Osaka University’s 3D bioprinting technology, which allows the creation of muscle tissue structures at will, and can be applied to the fields of food as well as regenerative medicine and drug discovery.

Press conference announcing Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat

Alongside the establishment of this consortium, Osaka University, Itoham Yonekyu, and Toppan Printing have opened a joint research course for “social implementation” of cultured meat on the Suita campus of Osaka University. This joint research course and the Osaka University-Shimadzu Analytical Innovation Collaborative Research Laboratory established in December 2019, will serve as the research promotion base for the consortium.

According to the announcement, the group has designated different roles for the member companies. From the announcement: Organizations participating in the consortium are “management partners” who engage in technological development, cooperation with government agencies and related organizations, and disseminate information to the outside world, “R&D partners” who engage in joint research in specific technical areas, and dissemination of cultivated meat-related technologies and products. It consists of “social implementation partners” who are responsible for disseminating information to Osaka University, Shimadzu, Itoham Yonekyu, Toppan Printing, and Sigmaxis will act as “operating partners”. 

The group has plans to showcase the technology in action at the ‘Osaka Healthcare Pavilion Nest for Reborn’ at the Osaka Kansai Expo, where it will exhibit automated cultured meat production equipment. Through this exhibition, the consortium plans to present cultured meat as one of the “foods of the future” which it says has the potential to reduce the environmental burden and help solve the global protein shortage, leading to the promotion of consumer understanding.

The new consortium isn’t the first organization in Japan for cultivated meat. In 2021, a group led by Integriculture announced the CulNet Consortium, a group intended to be an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. In January of this year, Integriculture debuted cultivated foie gras from duck liver-derived cells, which it developed using the CulNet Consortium framework.

Japan Prime Minister Wants to Develop Cultivated Meat Industry To Help Create Sustainable Food Supply

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to start developing Japan’s cellular agriculture industry with the aim of producing cultivated meat and fish, according to a story published today by the Japan news bureau, Nikkei.

“We will develop the environment to create a new market, such as efforts to ensure safety and the establishment of labeling rules, and foster a food tech business originating in Japan,” said Prime Minister Kishida as part of the announcement.

Nikkei reported that Kishida expanded on his plans at a House of Representatives Budget Committee on the same day, telling Nobuhiro Nakayama of the Liberal Democratic Party, “Foodtech, including cellular foods, is an important technology from the perspective of realizing a sustainable food supply. We have to support efforts that contribute to solving the world’s food problems.”

While Japan’s regulatory environment for the sale of cell-cultivated meat has been viewed by some as one that could create a fairly quick glide path as compared to other countries, there are still a few regulatory hurdles that need to be settled for cultivated meat to be sold to consumers. Last year the Japanese Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry of Japan formed a team of experts to study the safety of cultivated meat and its associated production process. Almost a year later, the Japanese government is still defining what constitutes cultured meat as food and working to develop safety standards for raw materials and manufacturing processes.

Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Katsunobu Kato said, “While paying close attention to the state of research and development, scientific findings on safety, and international trends, we will further consider what measures are necessary in terms of safety.”

Kishida’s focus on developing the cultivated meat industry is an encouraging sign for the numerous startups from the island nation that have been working on developing cultivated meat technology for the past few years. This includes Integriculture, which in 2021 announced the Culnet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. Japan food conglomerate Ajinomoto is also eager to develop the market, having inked a deal last year with Israel-based cultivated meat startup Supermeat.

The support by Japan’s leading government officials also underscores a trend in which we’ve seen countries with low food sovereignty take a particular interest in new food technologies as a way to increase their self-dependence. Singapore and Israel have been similarly proactive, pushing for investment and accelerated regulatory pathways for sales of cultivated meat.

Here in the US. the path towards government approval of cultivated meat took a big step forward when UPSIDE Foods announced it has become the first company in the world to receive a “No Questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cultivated meat, poultry, or seafood. All eyes across the globe have been watching the U.S. government’s approval process closely and some believe we will see sales of cultivated meat to consumers sometime this year.

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurants in Japan Will Soon Use a Fry-Cooking Robot

TechMagic, a Tokyo-based restaurant robotics startup, has signed a development deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan to build a robot to automate the entire process of cooking french fries.

According to company CEO Yuji Shiraki, preliminary testing of the TechMagic fry robots is complete and is the company is moving into the development phase, where they will focus on productization and in-store installation. The fry-bot will manage fry-feeding, frying, bagging, storing, and arranging the french fries. The company is also working to reduce the size of the frybot so as to enable deployment into space-contrained spaces of existing Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Shiraki says they are aiming to introduce the robot in some Japanese locations by this fall.

Spoon readers may recall that TechMagic has already been working with restaurant operators to deploy its back-of-house food robots in restaurants in Japan. I had a chance to visit one, the P-Robo, last September when I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The robot is a multi-function robot that automates nearly the entire process of creating pasta. It preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner, and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is plated and a human does the final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleansthe prep bowls. The entire process takes less than two minutes.

You can see the P-Robo in action below:

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The Tokyo restaurant where P-Robo slings pasta is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan food and beverage conglomerate Suntory. When I interviewed Shiraki last summer, he indicated that they were also working with a large well-known Japanese food brand (presumably KFC Japan) and noodle giant Nissin.

For those wondering if this move means we’ll see KFC deploy robots stateside, I wouldn’t hold your breath, mainly because KFC Japan is operated by Mitsubishi, whereas the U.S. fried chicken chain is operated by the holding company Yum Brands.

Softbank Brings Yo-Kai, Servi & Pepper Together to Demo End-to-End Roboticized Food Service

Last week, the robotics division of Japanese tech and energy conglomerate Softbank showed off a future in which food service robots work hand in hand to deliver a meal to the customer.

The demo featured a Yo-Kai ramen vending machine, a Servi server robot from Bear Robotics, and Softbank’s own Pepper humanoid robot acting as a host and entertainer. The announcement and demo were part of a newly focused effort by Softbank Robotics to position itself as a robotics integrator.

The demo took place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, at Softbank’s robot restaurant proof of concept store, Pepper House. As seen in the video below, the process flow for a food order starts with the consumer ordering on an app. From there, Yo-Kai starts preparing the ramen, and a cartoon version of Pepper appears on the screen preparing the ramen. Once the ramen is ready, Pepper sends a notification to Servi to approach the Yo-Kai. From there, a human removes the ramen from the Yo-Kai and places it on Servi’s tray, and Servi brings the hot ramen to the customer’s table.

ラーメン調理ロボット自動販売機　注文、調理、配膳すべて自動化 SoftBank Ramen robot vending machine, order,cook,serving ,automated

According to the Japanese publication Robotstart, Softbank envisions the installation of a robot hand on the Servi in the future to eliminate the need for a human server.

The demo is an interesting illustration of a fully automated robotic future. Most implementations of food robotics today involve single robots that automate only a portion of the food service process, whether prep, cooking or serving food itself. We haven’t seen many examples of the interconnection between the various parts of the process, mainly because startups building these machines tend to focus on the part of the process. Softbank hopes to change that by providing integration services to combine all the pieces into one integrated service offering.

If other more mature industries are any indication, the arrival of integration services to the food robotics business is a relatively natural evolution of a currently nascent industry. Other tech sectors like enterprise IT, telecom, and retail tech all have evolved integration consulting industries, and it’s not hard to imagine some of the more prominent players in adjacent spaces moving to become food robotics integrators like Softbank. The ability to tie together disparate robotic systems from different companies will become relatively commonplace and a necessary step to push the food robotics space beyond the small niche it resides in today and will be instrumental in building the fully automated restaurant concepts of tomorrow.

Autonomous Restaurant Startup Yo-Kai Express Expands in Japan, Announces New Investors

This spring, Yo-Kai Express ramen vending machines showed up at Tokyo Station, Haneda Airport, and Shibaura Parking Area. During its Japanese debut, the company worked with Ippudo to sell bowls of the hugely popular ramen chain’s noodles through its automated mini-restaurants.

And sell noodles they did. According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, during the first week, the Tokyo station machine sold a hundred bowls of ramen per day. That strong demand apparently impressed Ippudo enough to not only greenlight more Yo-Kai machines distributing their ramen in the near future, but to also invest in the company.

The news of the expanded relationship was shared as part of a press conference and on-stage session at SKS Japan on Friday in Tokyo. In addition to the news of Ippudo’s investment (through its parent company Chikaranomoto Holdings), Yo-Kai also shared that Japan Tobacco (JT) would be participating in the funding round. JT has a significant processed food business, and Yo-Kai will begin selling the company’s TableMark udon noodles through its vending machines. The total capital invested by the two companies via the Series A round was not disclosed.

According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, both companies see Yo-Kai as a way to connect to new customers in places where they might not otherwise reach.

“We are their extension,” Lin said. “They don’t need to spend the capital. We are their micro-store.”

Yo-Kai’s Japan country manager Keiji Tsuchiya told me that CPG brands like the idea of using Yo-Kai to trial new food concepts. He said while established food companies with well-known brands might be slow to launch a new product through traditional channels, they can trial new products much more quickly and easily with Yo-Kai. Some, said Tsuchiya, even launch a “virtual” brand concept on Yo-Kai to see how consumers respond.

“For a Japanese food company, selling products with their own name brand is a long process,” Tsuchiya said. “They need to get board approval to start something. It takes one to two years. But with a virtual brand, it’s much easier.”

According to Lin, Yo-Kai plans to expand its Japan vending machine footprint from the current total of three to ten in the near future. They also plan to continue to expand in the US and are talking with other large brands in places such as Korea about entering their market.

The Spoon is Back in Tokyo for SKS Japan

The Spoon is back in Japan!

That’s right, we’re back in Tokyo this week for the sixth Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, the first time we’ve been back in person since 2019 (for obvious reasons). The event started in 2017 and has grown to become the country’s biggest conference focused on food and cooking innovation.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from some of the country’s most innovative startups, researchers, scientists, and academics about how Japan’s food tech scene has evolved over the past few years. We’ll be talking alt protein, cellular agriculture, smart kitchen, restaurant tech, and more.

If you’d like to attend virtually, you can pick up your ticket here. We’ll also be bringing you some interviews on The Spoon, so keep an eye out for that.

Japan is one of the most innovative and exciting places in the world for culinary innovation, and we couldn’t be more excited to spend the next three days talking food tech in Tokyo. Join us!

Big in Japan: Yo-Kai Attracts Huge Press With Japanese Launch of Ramen Robot

In the middle of Japan’s busiest train station, Yo-Kai Express debuted its third ramen robot in Japan in three weeks. The new Tokyo Station robot joins other Yo-Kai Express machines installed at Haneda Airport and the Shibaura Parking Area.

If you think the unveiling of a new food robot might slip under the radar in this ramen-obsessed country, you’d be wrong. At a press conference held yesterday by Yo-Kai to unveil their latest robot and discuss their entry into Japan, over 70 members of the Japanese media showed up. The result was at least a dozen articles and news reports across broadcast and print.

The interest in Yo-Kai is understandable. After all, Japan is well-recognized as a mecca for vending machines, and here’s a new robot that makes the country’s favorite food in 90 seconds. In a few years, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Yo-Kai machines sprinkled around Tokyo and other Japanese cities to serve up hot bowls to those too busy to sit down in a local slurp shop.

While some ramen shop operators might be upset by the entry of a ramen-making robot, others see it as an exciting new opportunity, including the founder of the most popular ramen joint in Japan, Ippudo.

“A vending machine cooks hot ramen on the spot,” said Shigemi Kawahara, President, and Founder of Ippudo. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

Of course, Kawahara has reason to be excited. Ippudo’s Tonkotsu Ramen will soon be added to Yo-Kai’s menu.

Photo credit: Hitoshi Hokamura

Japan’s CulNet Consortium, an ‘Open Innovation Platform’ for Cell-Based Meat, Officially Launches

Last week a group of Japan-based companies announced the official launch of the CulNet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. The announcement, made by Japan cell-based meat startup IntegriCulture, details the member companies and outlines the activities of the group.

The group’s platform is centered around an open innovation framework developed by IntegriCulture, one of Japan’s most visible and active startups in cellular agriculture. The Uni-CulNet framework and the Consortium plans were originally announced in May of 2020, when IntegriCulture described the framework as “a standardized cellular agriculture infrastructure” that “rapidly establishes the foundation for democratized cellular agriculture.”

The consortium’s member companies plan to cooperate across five different areas to help accelerate the sector’s overall advancement: cell source, culture medium, CulNet hardware, product bioreactor, and product processing.

From the release:

  • Standardized culture media: Recipes that are fundamentally different from the existing media (basal media). Basal media are the raw material for all cultured cell products, and a different type is required for each kind (food, material, medical, etc.).
  • CulNet SystemTM hardware: Hardware that lets people use the CulNet SystemTM across a broad spectrum of uses, whether it’s in mass production or just at home.
  • Product bioreactors: Bioreactors that are used to make things like the products’ edible parts. We estimate that a variety of animals used as agricultural products will be a source for the cells.
  • Cell product processing: The process control that is needed to meet the products’ processing and safety requirements (cell components and culture supernatant).
  • Cell sources: The process that is used to extract and culture cells from livestock and fishery resources and the systems that enable the whole sequence of processes to be completed right where the cell sources are produced—tailoring them to their intended use, source animal species, etc.

It’s not surprising IntegriCulture and its founder Yuki Hanyu are a driving force behind a standardization push around open innovation. Hanyu has been the most visible evangelist for cell-based meat in Japan over the last few years, and his company’s ethos for open innovation was signaled by the efforts he put into building a DIY cultured meat initiative with the Shojinmeat project.

The CulNet Consortium isn’t the only industry organization gaining momentum as the cell-based meat industry matures. The Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood Innovation (AMPS Innovation), an industry group focused on market education and industry advocacy, just announced an eighth member, Orbillion Bio, who joins Eat Just, Upside and Blue Nalu, among others. AMPS has been working to influence US policy to support the cultured meat industry, including a recent joint industry letter to the FDA after its call for input into the labeling framework for cell-based meat.

2Foods Launches Plant-Based Junk Food Chain in Tokyo

Veganism and flexitarianism are on the rise in Japan. According to an article by VegNews, there are currently 1,000 vegan restaurants in Japan, compared to just 400 two years ago. To address this increase in plant-forward eating in Japan, TWO inc. officially opened the first three locations of its “healthy junk food” cafe concept 2foods.

2foods is a cafe spin-off of TWO inc.’s FoodTech Park, an experimental store where consumers can experience food tech products from all over the world. (The company described it as a food-tech version of b8ta.) Currently, FoodTech Park is hosting exhibitions from companies like OmniMeat, Next Meat, and MAAHA Chocolate. It is located right next to the 2foods flagship cafe in Shibuya, Tokyo.

The café aims to merge the two worlds of familiar and comforting junk food with better-for-you plant-based ingredients. So far, its menu includes items like plant-based chicken sandwiches, sandwiches with a donut bun, ramen, curry, chocolate brownies, a variety of beverages, and donuts. All of the items are fully vegan, and some of the ingredients have a food tech twist.

For example, the vegan chocolate brownie is made from a base of brown rice flour. However, the rice is processed in a manner that the particles are broken down at a low temperature to be extra fine and retain nutrients. This allows the flour to absorb water and hold together the ingredients like eggs would, resulting in a fluffy, moist brownie with no animal-based ingredients. The same technique is used with brown rice flour to create the cafe’s gluten-free noodles.

The 2foods cafes will co-develop menu items with emerging food tech start-ups, which can also test new products and prototypes at the cafe locations. OmniMeat (previously OmniPork) and 2foods will soon be collaborating to launch an exclusive food product. Additionally, 2foods will partner with food tech start-ups to help commercialize their new products globally and distribute them to its physical stores, online store, and to other retailers at a wholesale price.

The 2foods online store and the concept’s first three physical locations are now open in different areas of Tokyo, Japan. The company plans to launch 100-150 worldwide within the next three years.