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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Japan

Spoon Plus Deep Dive : A Conversation With Taichi Isaku on How Japan’s Food Industry is Dealing With COVID-19

This includes Japan. To learn more about what’s going on in that country, I caught up with Taichi Isaku, the CEO of CoCooking.

I’d met Isaku in 2018 when I was in Tokyo for the second Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. Speaking to me in flawless English, Isaku told me about CoCooking’s online marketplace called TABETE which sold excess restaurant food at a discount to customers in Tokyo and other big cities. You can read about the company here in a post I wrote about their seed funding.

During our chat, we talked about how restaurants are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, including some of the new digital strategies many are employing. We also talked about how restaurants are navigating Japan’s unique legal system and how the government is dealing with the crisis. We also discussed the ways in which consumer behavior is changing in the midst of the pandemic.

This Spoon Plus Deep Dive conversation is available only to Spoon Plus subscribers. Purchase a Spoon Plus membership to get access to this exclusive content and much more.

Robot Bartender Now Serving Drinks in Tokyo Train Station

Just when you thought Tokyo couldn’t get any more futuristic, the city’s subway system has a new robot bartender serving up drinks to commuters.

The Daily Mail reported this week that the Yoronotaki company has launched the Zeroken Robo Tavern in the Ikebukuro train station. The small pop-up opened on Jan. 23 and will run as a pilot to gauge customer reaction to the concept until March 19th.

The robot itself is just an articulating arm with an LED face. Customers enter their order via separate kiosk and then the robot whirrs into action, pouring out a beer in 40 seconds, or mixing up a cocktail for something a little stronger.

The robot is made by QBIT Robotics, which also built the Henn Na robot barista, also in Tokyo. The robot costs $82,000, which is evidently three years’ salary for an average bartender in Japan. Yoronotaki told the Daily Mail that labor shortages in Japan are part of the reason it is trying the robot out.

Japan has a greying population with more than one-third of its people over the age of 65. Many companies are working on robotic solutions to help stave off any potential labor crisis. Sony has teamed up with Carnegie-Mellon University to create food robots and has big ambitions for a robotic home cooking assistant. Connected Robots, which makes the takoyaki-cooking Octochef robot, raised raised a ¥850M ($7.8 million USD) last year to expand its food robot lineup. And in 2018, the Dawn Avatar cafe used robot servers that were operated remotely by people with disabilities.

Given how small the retail spaces in Japan can be, and the volume of people that travel Tokyo’s subway system, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more robot bartenders pop up across Japan.

Uber Eats to Deliver Food From Lawson Convenience Stores in Tokyo

During The Spoon’s recent trip to Tokyo, we took Anthony Bourdain’s advice and discovered the magic that is dining at Japanese convenience stores. In fact, the only thing that could have made those egg salad sandwiches any better was not having to go out in 100 degree August heat to get them.

Good news for those in Tokyo who also wilt going outside in Summer! Lawson, Japan’s third largest convenience store chain, will start offering delivery via Uber Eats. As Reuters reports:

Lawson said it will start selling around 100 products including bento boxes, fried chicken and tissue paper through Uber Eats starting on Thursday, initially for users near its stores in Shinjuku and Shinagawa before a later expansion.

Uber’s main business, ride sharing, is banned in Japan, so its food delivery business plays an outsized role over there. According to a recent Bloomberg article, Uber has partnerships with 10,000 restaurants in Japan, across ten cities in the country. Uber also has 15,000 couriers in the country, including many elderly folks who make deliveries by foot.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing for Uber since the company went public this past May. In fact, the company reported losses of $5.2 billion in its second quarter. And despite its 140 percent year-over-year growth, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he doesn’t expect Uber Eats to be profitable next year or the year after that.

This deal with Lawson won’t move the needle much on that rather grim scenario for Uber Eats, but it will make getting egg salad sandwiches a whole lot easier for those lucky people in Tokyo.

The Food Tech Show: Big in Japan

Let’s talk about Japan!

We were in Tokyo this month for the third annual Smart Kitchen Summit Japan so, naturally, this podcast is all about the magical wonderland that is the Land of the Rising Sun.

Not only did the Spoon team spend two great days talking food tech with some of the coolest thinkers and entrepreneurs in Japan and broader Asia, we also ran around Tokyo checking out food robots, eating amazing food and delighting in the wonders of the Japanese version of 7-Eleven.

You can read some of the coverage of what we found in Japan here, and if you want to meet many of those who participated in SKS Japan, make sure to come to SKS North America (use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of tickets).

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download this episode directly to your phone or just click play below.

A Q&A with United Super Market Holdings’ Motohiro Fujita About Innovation in Japanese Grocery

I’ve been eating my way through Tokyo all week, but it wasn’t until the very end of my trip that I realized that in all my wanderings, all my bowls of delicious ramen, and all of my guzzled milk teas, I haven’t been in or even seen a grocery store.

Or at least what my American view of a grocery store is.

So it was fortuitous that Motohiro Fujita, President and Representative Director for United Super Markets Holdings (USMH) in Japan spoke this week at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan. USMH has 518 markets across 6 prefectures in Japan, and Mr. Fujita was kind enough to sit down with me to answer a few questions about the grocery industry here.

Following is a translation of our Q&A with some light editing for clarity.

The Spoon: 1. Can you give me some broad differences between US groceries stores and Japanese grocery stores?

Motohiro Fujita: I think there are two types of American supermarkets. One of the types is the so-called winners, like Krogers and Walmarts. The other type of supermarket is so-called legacy. Japanese supermarkets are closer to legacy markets. By legacy he means, the winners are close to their customers, in the way that they have smartphone applications and data on each customer, and the relationship between the customer and supermarket is pretty intimate. For a legacy player, they are more distant.

2. How big is online grocery shopping in Japan? Is it growing?

Our online grocery business is growing 10 percent over last year.

3. Is grocery delivery popular in Japan? Is it something Japanese customers are interested in?

Delivery is only a small amount of the sales in each store. The way people are using their time is changing. They want to go outside and go various places when they have time. That’s why they are using the delivery. It’s not a matter of direct interest in delivery services, but a preference in their whole lifestyle.

4. Has USMH explored automation or robotics in its stores for order fulfillment, inventory management or local delivery?

For the past year, we have been experimenting with inventory management robot during the nighttime when the shop is closed to count inventory and check to make sure each item is aligned on a shelf properly. We are expecting to launch this as a product in about a year.

5. Is USMH exploring cashierless checkout, similar to Amazon Go?

We are planning to go into a cashierless store experiment. We have a cashierless checkout system that we developed ourselves.

Cafe in Japan Uses Robots to Create Jobs for People with Disabilities

When we talk about robots in restaurants, we often talk about the human jobs that will be lost to this impending automation. But a cafe that opened in Tokyo this week is actually using robots to create jobs for people with physical disabilities.

The Japan Times reports that the Dawn Avatar cafe in Minato Ward, Tokyo will feature five robots that are roughly 3.9 feet tall that will take orders and serve food. The robots transmit audio and video over the internet so they can be controlled by people with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) remotely from their homes. Ten remote workers with ALS will get ¥1,000 (~$8.79) an hour in wages for controlling the robots.

The cafe was formed as a joint project between Ory Lab, which develops the robots, Nippon Foundation and ANA Holdings. This iteration of the cafe is just a trial run and will only be open until Dec. 7. The three companies hope to launch a permanent version of the cafe in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

A shrinking population in japan is creating a labor shortage and robots are being built to do manual, repetitive work like making Takoyaki, a street food made from batter balls and minced octopus, and crêpes (even tri-colored ones!).

As Mike Wolf reported from our last Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan, a lot of innovation in that country comes from R&D departments in larger, established companies. For instance, Sony recently showed off its vision of the home robot chef and has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to develop food robots. And Softbank recently hooked up with Toyota to form MONET, a venture that will build autonomous vehicles to do things like deliver robot-made meals.

What I appreciate about Japan’s robot ambitions is how they are tying these programs into real world needs: aging at home, added mobility and in the case of this new cafe, providing new job opportunities for people who need them.

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

Smart Kitchen Summit Returns to Japan This August

Last year, we took the Smart Kitchen Summit abroad for the first time — to none other than Tokyo, Japan! In SKS founder Michael Wolf’s words:

“As we have grown SKS, I also realized early on that each region’s story is different, impacted by a unique mix of culture, business dynamics, and consumer tastes. Because of this, we decided would take SKS on the road, not only because I wanted to bring our community to other parts of the world, but also because I thought it important to incorporate these stories into our community as we look to help map the future of the kitchen.”

We’re thrilled to be bringing back Smart Kitchen Summit Japan for the second year! Once again we’re partnering with SigmaXYZ, one of the leading strategy consultancies in Japan, to bring you a dynamite lineup of executives, startups, and entrepreneurs leading in the food innovation space.

This time around we’ll be focusing on the companies and trends that are disrupting the meal journey, from flavor personalization to guided cooking to the future of protein. Taking the stage will be speakers Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites, a Chinese food tech accelerator; Kevin Yu, the CEO of smart cooking startup SideChef; and SKS favorite Jon Jenkins of Hestan Cue.

We’re looking forward to returning to Tokyo to continue to explore and push the boundaries on the technology, entrepreneurship, and business models which will impact the Japanese and Asian kitchens. There’s a lot of exciting innovation in the meal journey in Japan that’s set to change the face of food and cooking across the globe.

If you would like to attend SKS Japan, get tickets soon — spots are limited!

Smart Kitchen Summit Heads to Japan This August

In 2014, I noticed that the technologies I had been writing about for over a decade in digital media, networking, big data, automation, and mobility were beginning to touch how people make, discover, buy, cook and consume food.

In short, I realized the world of food and cooking were in the early days of a large-scale shift, one that would result in significant innovation over the next few decades in product design, food science and, perhaps most importantly, business models.

And so with the biggest changes still ahead, I created the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015 with the hope of bringing the people from the worlds of food, appliances, retail, and tech together to have a conversation about the future. In just two short years, my little event has become the leading global summit on the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Last year’s event grew by 60%, and this year SKS is expanding to two full days with the most impressive lineup of speakers yet.

As we have grown SKS, I also realized early on that each region’s story is different, impacted by a unique mix of culture, business dynamics, and consumer tastes. Because of this, we decided would take SKS on the road, not only because I wanted to bring our community to other parts of the world, but also because I thought it important to incorporate these stories into our community as we look to help map the future of the kitchen.

And so with that, I am thrilled to announce our first non-US event, the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

To put together this exciting event which will occur in Tokyo on August 25th, I worked with a wonderful partner in SigmaXYZ, one of the leading strategy consultancies in Japan. My first contact with SigmaXYZ was with Hirotaka Tanaka, who had attended SKS2016 in Seattle.  A few months later I connected with Hiro and his associate Akiko Okada at CES in Las Vegas, where we realized we had a similar excitement and interest in how innovation will impact the food, cooking and kitchen ecosystems. It didn’t take long for us to start discussing SKS Japan, and now I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Hiro, Akiko and the team at SigmaXYZ to bring together our first international SKS.

We’ve created a day packed with engaging sessions with visionaries from Japanese companies such as Cookpad and Oisix, US innovators such as PicoBrew, SideChef and Hestan Cue, as well as thought leaders from the Europe such as Johnny Grey to discuss the future of food and cooking technology, design and business models.

In addition to a jam-packed day full of sessions, but we are going to highlight startup innovation with a Startup Showcase. The Showcase, sponsored by Oisix, the largest meal kit delivery company in Japan, will feature both Japanese and US innovators pitching their technology.

In short, we have put together a summit in which we will explore how technology, culture and business model innovation will impact the Japanese and Asian kitchens, as well as explore how innovation originating in Japan could change the face of food and cooking across the globe.

If you would like to attend SKS Japan, I’d love to have you join us in Tokyo. You can buy tickets here, but I would suggest your hurry, as tickets are limited.

If you’re interested in participating as a sponsor, feel free to drop us a line and we’ll get back to you.

I look forward to seeing you in Tokyo in August.

Image credit: Flickr user Mirai Takahashi under creative commons license.