Foodex Offers Palate Teasers for Culinary Trends

Yomiuri Shimbun

14-05-2025

The Japan News
Crowds take in the latest food and beverage products in the Japan area of the Foodex trade show at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center in March
Hungry for something new? How about some braised kangaroo tail or eringi mushroom chips or teriyaki fish jerky — perhaps with some do-it-yourself tiramisu for dessert? These foods and thousands more were showcased at the recent Foodex trade show in Tokyo.
The 50th edition of an event billed as Asia's largest food and beverage exhibition drew 2,930 companies, nearly one-third of them from Japan and the rest from more than 70 countries and regions, many hoping to find Japanese distributors or retail outlets. Over its four-day run in March, the Foodex recorded a total attendance of 72,151 people.
Here's a sampling of some products that might be on their way to your table in Japan.
Packaging wild meat
Japanese consumers might be more used to seeing kangaroo and wild boar on wildlife documentaries than on supermarket shelves, but two different exhibitors were working to change that.
One was Macro Group Australia, which sells kangaroo meat under the brand name Paroo. I tried a slice of seared lean kangaroo that was lightly charred on the outside, with a deep meaty flavor on the inside. The company's national sales manager Clayton Graham described it as 'between venison and a yearling beef' but with a character of its own.
He showed me a kangaroo tail, a cylinder of bright red meat as thick as my forearm with a thin covering of whitish tendon.
'What chefs would normally do is they will braise the outside, caramelize it and then cook it like an oxtail,' Graham explained.
He said the company processes about 6,000 kangaroos each week, out of an estimated national wild population of 50 million of the animals.
Paroo meat is currently available in Japan via the Horizon Farms website and is also distributed to food service companies. Hoping to appeal directly to Japanese consumers in their local supermarket's meat section, the company was also presenting thinly sliced kangaroo meat in small packs of about 300 grams that could serve one or two people.
'We're looking at a range where you'd have something attached like a little bit of avocado oil, so people know what to use with it,' Graham said. He also mentioned plans for packages of ready-to-grill kangaroo burgers, noting the importance of 'having products that people are familiar with.'
Packaging is also part of the strategy of Gibier Japon, a brand that makes use of the meat of wild boars trapped by hunters in the course of wildlife management in Chiba Prefecture. The brand sells boar sausages, boar gyoza dumplings and retort-pouch boar curry — even treats for dogs in the form of boar and venison jerky.
Its most attention-grabbing product is the 'Gibier Kiba Dog,' a 210-gram boar meat hot dog that was sold at the Fuji Speedway racetrack in Shizuoka Prefecture for a limited time and is also available via the company's website. It comes in a conical paper container with a lid at the wide end designed to evoke the face of a wild boar, complete with tusks. After the hot dog has been fully consumed, perforations in the cone allow you to remove the pointy end, turning the empty container into a megaphone for cheering on your favorite race car driver.
There were plenty of non-wild meat products as well, such as lamb from the island of Tasmania, which is Australia's southernmost state. A sales manager at the booth promoting that product said winds from Antarctica carry minerals that end up in Tasmania's grass, improving the meat of the sheep that graze on it. Grilled bite-sized samples of the succulent meat were being served on toothpicks. I ate three of them.
Exporting fish, vegetables
In addition to foreign companies looking to get into the Japanese market, there were also Japanese companies promoting the export of their products. One example was Hiramatsu Seafoods Co., which has been preserving fish as tsukudani — boiled in a soy-based sauce — for over 100 years. The Aichi Prefecture company markets its tsukudani in English under the more familiar-sounding name of 'Teriyaki Fish.'
At the Foodex, the company displayed an array of colorfully labeled vacuum-packed Teriyaki Fish including sardines, salmon trout and saury. They come in various flavors, including soft jerky style with black pepper.
Company President Kensuke Hiramatsu told me the company's preserved fish is exported to Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States. He also let me taste a new product aimed at the European Union. It is a European sprat, a fish of the herring family, in a gingery Japanese sauce. Hiramatsu said the ingredients and production facilities all had to meet EU standards.
Ryo Kuwano of Yokohama-based Japanese vegetable side dish maker O-hori Co. made a similar point. He said his company wanted to increase its currently small level of exports, and so it was developing some new items using only ingredients that are permitted in target markets like the EU and the United States. The company was also adapting its preparation techniques to extend the products' shelf life.
As its products might not be familiar overseas, O-hori also presented simple recipes to show how they can be used, such as by mixing its Beji Soboro (Vegetable mince) with rice for a quick onigiri rice ball snack, or adding its Yamitsuki Ao-togarashi (Addictive green peppers) to a dish of pepperoncino pasta or combining it with mayonnaise to make a tartar sauce for fried fish.
Vegetables were presented in a different way by Taiwan brand Frenature, whose Foodex booth featured an array of convenient snacks: carrot chips, pumpkin chips, burdock chips and green bean chips. Topping the novelty scale were king oyster mushroom chips, made with the fungus known as eringi in Japanese. But the company's banana chips were my favorite. They were thicker and sweeter than banana chips I have eaten in the past.
Nick Lin, president of parent company Lovita Corporation, said the banana chips were the best seller. He said the products were available in Japan only on Amazon for now, but the company is looking to get into brick-and-mortar stores.
Edible inventions
The Japan News
Yuzu, dashi broth and other flavors of sprayable foams
Eringi mushroom chips weren't the only familiar food I saw in unfamiliar form. Dashi broth has been a basic element of Japanese cuisine for generations, but the Foodex was my first chance to encounter it in the form of a sprayable foam. Packaged in a can that looks like it might contain hairstyling mousse, the flavored foam comes from Lumica Corporation, a company known for producing lighted fishing lures and concert glow sticks.
Lumica employee Saori Oba recommended using the dashi spray on sashimi and meat, and the honey spray on bread or ice cream. There were also white truffle and (very tangy) yuzu citrus foam sprays on offer.
The Japan News
Curry made with cocoa pod husks
The Cacao Curry lineup from Kyoto-based Biostyle Co., founded in 2017, also looked innovative. The flavors on display — including green, keema and butter chicken — don't sound especially chocolatey, but a sales manager at the booth told me that the curry is actually made with the husks of cocoa beans, less for the flavor than for nutritional benefits such as dietary fiber. Both he and the company's website stressed that using cocoa husks was an environmentally friendly way to upcycle a material that would otherwise go to waste.
Another company at the Foodex went so far as to reinvent pizza. Or, to use the new product's proper name, pinsa. Italian bakery company Di Marco had a booth where several chefs were busy shoveling rectangular slabs of pinsa bread into and out of hot ovens, adding various toppings such as meat, cheese and olives, and serving the results to an eagerly awaiting crowd.
'Pinsa is like a new kind of pizza from Rome. It's not just wheat flour; it's wheat, soy and rice flour, with a bit of sourdough inside … And we also mature it for 72 hours. That helps break down the gluten and makes it a lot more digestible,' Dario Capanelli explained to me, adding that he and his brother serve the dish at Bonta Italia, a restaurant they run in Daikanyama, Tokyo.
Each piece of pinsa bread, resembling a miniature futon, had a thin, crisp, toasted crust and an airy, chewy interior. It was much lighter than a conventional pizza crust. And it was delicious, as I confirmed more than once.
Time for dessert
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Celebrity chef Laurian Veaudour displays madeleines that he decorated for the St. Michel bakery company.
Walking through the large display area of foods from France, it was hard to miss the 'madeleine tower,' which looked like a tall revolving Christmas tree covered in pastries. On closer inspection, the golden French cakes turned out to be decorated with Japanese elements such as green matcha glaze, pink cherry blossoms and black sesame seeds.
'I'm a big believer that when you export products you need to meet between your product and the culture of where you go,' said pastry chef Laurian Veaudour, who decorated the madeleines for the St. Michel bakery company.
The company was displaying the little cakes as well as its galette butter cookies in an effort to appeal to both retail consumers and food service companies. To show what could be done with the basic products, Veaudour — winner of the 2020 season of British TV show 'Bake Off: The Professionals' — said he had made a Mont Blanc madeleine with chestnut cream inside it and was also experimenting with yuzu.
Another popular European sweet to appear in new form at the Foodex was Italian tiramisu, displayed by Sardinian confectioner Tipico as a do-it-yourself kit. Export manager Alice Angius told me that Tipico already sells its plain ladyfinger pastries in Japanese stores, but the tiramisu kit is being newly launched here.
'In Italy, we have different ladyfingers. The ones in the North are hard and small; ours [in Sardinia] are bigger and softer,' she told me.
Usually dipped in coffee or tea for breakfast, the ladyfingers are made of eggs, sugar and flour — 'Nothing else!' — with eggs accounting for 50% of the mix. Tipico goes through 120,000 eggs in a day, Angius said.
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Sri Astutik displays a spicy chocolate bar from her company's Aranaspice brand at the Indonesian pavilion.
The kit contains 'eight of our ladyfingers, tiramisu mix with mascarpone powder, instant coffee, cocoa and the tray where the consumer can make tiramisu. So, the consumer just needs to add milk or heavy cream, and in 10 minutes you have your own tiramisu,' she said.
If you can't wait 10 minutes, ready-made dessert options include chewy halva from Turkey and spicy chocolate from Indonesia.
'Halva is a traditional Middle Eastern sweet. It's made of tahini, which is sesame paste,' explained M. Batuhan Boztoprak, a sales rep for Metin Halva & Jam.
I have often enjoyed halva in the United States, but this was the first time I had seen it in Japan. Boztoprak gave me a bar of it, laced with cacao, which had a softer texture than I was used to but the dense sesame flavor I had hoped for.
He also let me taste tahini spread in various flavors, including orange and cacao, and showed me a product called SplenD'or, which the company hopes people will buy as a luxury gift. Consisting of waffle-cone cups filled with halva and sprinkled with crushed pistachios, it offers an appealing combination of textures when heated in a microwave, which makes the cups crunchier, he said.
At the nearby Indonesian Pavilion, I sampled a delicious Aranaspice brand chocolate bar. Made with ginger, turmeric, Javanese long pepper and other plants, it initially tasted like a darker, earthier version of pumpkin spice, followed by a slight peppery bite that took a moment or two to kick in.
For a drinkable dessert, there was boba tea, better known as bubble tea. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in 2022 that this milk tea with large pearls of tapioca originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and came to Japan on three waves of popularity, with the latest beginning around 2017. Back then, it seemed like boba tea shops were opening on every corner.
But the drink's next wave of popularity might not involve tea shops at all. Taiwan company Jway Foods was promoting a kit for making boba tea at home. Its representatives told me the company was already exporting this product to the United States, where consumer feedback had led the firm to sweeten its recipe. The version on offer in Japan matches the U.S. style, while the products exported to South Korea and Europe were closer to the original Taiwan taste. They also mentioned that the company's boba tea kits had gone on sale at Costco in Japan only about a week before the Foodex opened.
Sure enough, at a Tokyo-area Costco a few days later, I spotted some 10-serving boxes of Jway boba tea. It included four flavors: milk, taro, passionfruit and creme brulee. A group of young women seemed to be deep in discussion about it. After they moved on, a gray-haired man picked up a box and held it out to a woman who appeared to be his wife. Her response could apply to many new items showcased at the Foodex: 'Ah, sugoi!'