Get a load of this bad boy:

And here are the bottles next to that eye-popping display:

This is habu-shu or habu snake liquor from Okinawa. Specifically, this is Habu Genshu from Nanto Shuzo, a distillery in the Ryukyu islands. It is made using awamori, Okinawa's traditional distilled liquor, infused with habu snake (pit viper) extract and 13 types of herbs. 

This drink has been made in the prefecture for centuries, and that snake in the bottle is entirely on brand. Habu-shu has traditionally been associated with vitality and stamina in men, because of course it has. The cottage industry to help dudes feel dude-ly is built on the silliest of made-up ingredients. 

But at its core, this is essentially a functional drink, which tells you something about how long Japan has been doing functional food before "functional" became a category.

Now that I have your undivided attention with the snake juice, here’s some other interesting stuff I saw at Foodex Japan earlier this month.

Anzen-anshin. Two Japanese words (anzen means safety, anshin means peace of mind) that together describe something close to a consumer religion in Japan. The expectation that what you eat is not just safe but provably, traceably safe. The ingredients are what the label says and the producer can be held to account if something is off.

In fact, the information on a product label in Japan is a bit overwhelming initially. Front-of-packs elsewhere in the world usually tend towards minimalism. Not in Japan. Things like ingredient origin, production location, nutrients, grading, and so on are pretty standard. Everyone expects it. 

I spent four days at Foodex trying to make sense of all this, because Japan right now is more complicated than it looks from the outside. The prices are up, the yen is weak, and a generation of consumers is experiencing inflation they never planned for. But quality is still non-negotiable. 

The biggest trends in global food and beverage right now - fermentation, plant-based, waste reduction, functional ingredients, mindful portioning, craft - Japan has been doing all of them for centuries. As part of the norm, not as a trend or some ideological movement. It was quite something else to see these “trends” displayed in such a straightforward, almost mundane, way at times.

This is probably one of the most unique trade shows I’ve been to so far. There’s a strong sense of pride in the different prefectures and the tiny differences in the products on offer. And if I’m being totally honest, there was a lot more interest in Japanese products and booths compared to the international ones.

And Japan has terroir, even though very few call it that. Even though that is usually wine language, the concept maps perfectly with Japanese food. And I don't just mean sake, though that appears to be its own rabbit hole worth falling into. I mean vegetables, fruit, pickles, alcohol of almost every kind. Every prefecture produces ingredients shaped by its specific water, soil, climate, and accumulated human knowledge. Sometimes, it’s even a bit scary. Take strawberries - I was told that nearly every prefecture is involved in an arms race of sorts to make the sweetest version. And some of those strawberries are as big as apples…

There must have been several dozens of different soy sauce and miso makers, with insanely specialized offerings in not small, but micro batches.

Like Aritaya, a soy sauce brewery from Annaka in Gunma Prefecture, started in 1832 and now in its seventh generation. They use the natural brewing method (apparently only about 10% of Japanese soy sauce producers still do this), aging their “moromi” (the main fermenting mash) in a 150-year-old stone warehouse for a minimum of two years, with minimal human intervention. They had four varieties at the show: a naturally brewed, a double brewed aged for three years, a smoked version using cherry wood chips, and a smoked tamari that is wheat-free, for the gluten-intolerant. Incidentally, they also use the word “terroir” on their own website, explicitly, to describe what they're doing. 

This kind of detail and craftsmanship also extended to miso and even vegetables & fruit.

Fermentation is as old as the hills, and most cultures have some form of fermented foods. We’ve just sort of forgotten that because we spent the best part of the last decade acting like sourdough and kimchi are shiny new playthings. They’re not. And Japan has been fermenting miso, soy sauce, sake, mirin, rice vinegar, tsukemono pickles, natto, and amazake forever. 

The average Japanese household interacts with multiple fermented products at every single meal without thinking about it. Japan's fermented food and beverage market was worth US$40.8 billion in 2025, and is expected to reach US$78.5 billion by 2034. There's more going on here than Yakult, is what I'm trying to say.

One of my favorite finds at the show was a gyoza from Maebashi in Gunma prefecture, made with konjac, a root vegetable that's been part of Japanese cooking for over a thousand years.

Three pieces contain 2.4g of dietary fiber, equivalent to two bananas, and 2.6 times the fiber of a standard gyoza. The booth was not making a vegan claim (even though there was a separate vegan pavilion) or a sustainability claim. This was a pure gut health, with supporting data, in a matter-of-fact way.

This is how plant-forward food works in Japan. Konjac, okara (the fiber-rich pulp left over from tofu production), edamame, tofu in its dozens of forms aren't substitutes for anything. They're just ingredients in their own right, with their own nutritional profiles, that happen to contain very little meat. 

There’s no ideology or manifesto on the packaging to piss off different groups of people. Just that this is nutritious, it’s tasty, it fits into a meal you already make, and here is the data. Also since this is Japan and you can’t make claims willy-nilly, I have no problem trusting this data. 

Japan has a word for the regret of waste, mottainai, and unlike most countries, it has turned that instinct into industrial policy. The global food industry talks about upcycling as innovation. Japan embeds it directly into manufacturing, driven by stricter regulation and an efficiency-first culture where anything edible gets a second life if it saves money or time.

The regulatory backstory matters. Japan's Food Waste Recycling Law in 2001 focused on the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. Diverting waste to animal feed or compost counted as compliance. Then in 2019 came the Food Loss Reduction Act. Only two Rs now: reduce and reuse. Recycling no longer counts as reduction. The goal is to keep edible food within the human food chain. Companies now have to upcycle byproducts into food, not just redirect them to a compost pile.

None of which is to pretend Japan has solved food waste. Convenience stores here change fresh food displays several times a day and the volumes that go unsold are significant. But the direction of travel is clear: byproducts are increasingly treated as raw materials. Japan is already legislating it, and this has brought out some interesting innovation as a result.

Small format packaging was everywhere at Foodex, not as a novelty or a diet product, but as the default. This isn't driven by calorie anxiety. It reflects something structural: 34% of Japanese households are now single-person, projected to rise to over 44% by 2050. Tokyo is already at 50%.

But small packs predate the demographic shift. They reflect a consumption philosophy that’s been around for generations: take what you'll finish, finish what you take. If you think about it, portion control (or maybe precision) is mottainai made physical.

Frozen food follows the same logic, and the category here operates at a very high quality level. The frozen halls at Foodex were genuinely impressive. A “Pick! Pack! Bento!” concept showing modular frozen components, including a main carb and two side dish slots, designed for assembling a bento box at home from individually frozen portions. 

The frozen category has grown steadily since the pandemic and is likely to keep growing as food inflation bites. Attitudes that saw frozen food as lower quality have significantly changed as quality, offerings, and technology improved during the pandemic. 

So now, you have frozen okonomiyaki from a well-known Osaka restaurant chain, bringing their regional dish into home freezers without compromise. Frozen udon made in Kagawa Prefecture (Sanuki udon country) with the provenance on the packaging even for a product that takes three minutes in a microwave.

For international brands used to family-size formats and bulk value messaging, both of these trends, small packs and premium frozen, require more than a packaging resize. They require rethinking the entire consumption occasion. Take this pie brand from Australia. The founder told me that they not only had to reduce the size of the pies for the Japanese market, but also had to launch packs as 4, 2, and single units to fit the market.

For all its depth and sophistication, Japanese food culture is facing pressures it hasn't seen in a generation.

Rice prices spiked sharply through 2024 into 2026 after poor harvests and distribution failures. As of February 2026, retail rice prices were above JPY4,000 (~USD25) for 5 kg on average, almost double the price before shortages hit.   

It’s come to a point where manufacturers using rice are having to change the way they do things. A mochi manufacturer told me they now import rice flour from Thailand to avoid raising prices, while a senbai maker admitted they would be finally raising prices this spring. 

Kobayashi Noodle owns Gluten Free Meister, a brand of gluten-free and vegan noodles made from rice, told me that because of the high price of rice, they have been working on developing a new base ingredient to contain their costs. They wouldn’t tell me what the base is though.

Behind the rice crisis sits a larger set of problems. 

One solution I came across at the show that absolutely fascinated me was from Toyota Boshoku, Toyota's textiles and components division. Vertical farming is not revolutionary and to be fair, it hasn’t lived up to the hype from 5 years ago. But Toyota has developed an indoor farming system called Lunar Rhythm cultivation. The idea is that plants respond to lunar cycles the way tides do, for instance, germination rates peak at new and full moon (apparently). Their lighting system mimics the gradual daily shift of moonlight across the lunar cycle rather than running identical artificial light every day. 

The results they're showing: 10% higher average yield, more consistent plant sizes, and significantly better freshness retention after seven days in cold storage compared to conventional indoor farms. Whether or not you find the moon theory convincing, the underlying problem it's trying to solve is real and getting worse. So it’s time to think outside the solar cycle…

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