Hong Kong food tech start-up challenges Japanese bento market

Kamakura Foods, a Hong Kong start-up founded by a Japan-educated former Sony chip engineer, is challenging the bento market in Japan, where the boxed lunches originated. The company is planning its entrance not through providing the food itself, but by introducing a tech platform for serving bentos automatically.

Bentos fill bellies across Japan every day, especially those of businesspeople during busy lunch hours. Some are made at home, but many thousands are sold at convenience stores and specialised bento shops, and even by restaurants to meet peak lunch hour demand.

The company, which uses the brand name Wada Bento, has sold more than 600,000 hot bentos in Hong Kong since its inception in 2019. It has 40 machines in 30 locations in office buildings, university campuses and construction sites. In the city, it operates its own kitchen to prepare up to 1,200 Japanese-style bentos a day, selling Hong Kong cuisine provided by its food partners to cater to local tastes as well.

Its maiden bento vending machine in Japan, in Kitahama, a central business district in Osaka, will be placed in an outlet of Obento Monogatari to sell the small local chain’s ready-made box lunches.

“Japanese people are experts in making bentos,” Jason Chen, founder and CEO of Kamakura Foods, told Nikkei Asia. “So our direction is not to invest in kitchens.”

What Chen sees is a great opportunity in providing a logistics solution to serve hot bentos, including the supply chain between kitchens and its proprietary bento-serving vending machines. “From a business point of view, Japan is a huge market” where speed and a labour shortage are becoming crucial factors, he said.

Chen, who obtained his master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Japan’s University of Tokyo and worked as an engineer designing drivers for display devices at Sony in Japan and later at Solomon Systech in Hong Kong, found an opportunity in serving hot bentos after seeing and experiencing difficulties in buying lunch during peak hours in central office areas, especially in big cities.

According to an annual survey by the Japan Ready-made Meal Association, sales of “steamed rice, etc”, which largely consists of bentos and onigiri rice balls, totalled 4.77tn yen ($31.6bn) in 2022, growing by 7.4 per cent from the year before and surpassing the pre-Covid year of 2019.

The Osaka bento shop where the first vending machine will be placed neighbours a 7-Eleven and a Lawson, run by two of the country’s largest convenience store chains. In Japan, convenience stores provide a wide range of bento selections and let customers heat them up in microwave ovens.

Even though local bento shops may be able to serve food with competitive quality and price, they face severe competition, especially during weekday lunch hours, because people are not willing to wait in line.

“Usually, if there are more than three people lined up, customers tend to go to either of the convenience stores,” said Seishiro Tsukuda, a project manager at the midsize Osaka-based trading house Harada Corporation, Kamakura Foods’ Japanese partner.

The latest model of Chen’s vending machine is able to serve a bento in 17 seconds after a customer places an order and has been redesigned to be accessible for people using wheelchairs. The machine holds multiple kinds of bentos, letting customers make various choices.

Tsukuda told Nikkei Asia that Obento Monogatari hoped the fast-serving vending machine would stop customers from defecting to convenience stores.

Japanese retailers, especially smaller ones, face serious employee shortages. The new machine is expected to potentially allow them to expand their sales opportunities after 6pm for a new market — dinner — without hiring new staff. “We could help increase their revenue,” said Chen.

The machines are rented out under a subscription model in which certain fees are charged according to the sales amount.

The core part of Chen’s tech solution is in temperature control. The food is kept consistently above 65C throughout the supply chain in order to serve customers hot meals and prevent the growth of bacteria that could cause food poisoning.

This “hot-chain” logistics is monitored and controlled by GPS and cloud-based Internet of Things technology. After bentos are made, they are placed in proprietary warm containers, usually able to carry 48 boxed lunches, where a heater is set at or slightly above 70C.

The system enables the remote checking and adjusting of temperature and humidity within the container if needed. No special features are required for the vehicles that deliver the containers to the vending machines. The company has gained eight patents so far out of nine filed in Japan, the US and China.

Securing food safety is a critical matter, especially following a major food poisoning case in the northern Japanese city of Hachinohe in September, triggered by poor temperature control by a local bento maker.

The local health authorities said at least 554 people were confirmed to have been affected by bentos served by the vendor, Yoshidaya.

Hiroki Yoshida, president of Yoshidaya, admitted to reporters on October 21 that the main cause of the food poisoning was “inappropriate temperature control”. He acknowledged that there had been a “lack of thorough understanding of the risk of germs multiplying over time” and said the 130 year-old company, which he inherited from his father, had succumbed to “conceit and carelessness” as it placed too much emphasis on profits.

This could be a worthy lesson for Chen, who is about to set foot in the Japanese market, as Yoshidaya was slapped with an indefinite ban on doing business, lifted only on November 4 after more than 40 days, leaving a severe stain on its long-earned reputation.

Chen is seeking a fourth round of funding next year to support his expansion plans in Japan, and Harada’s Tsukuda told Nikkei that Harada was in talks with other Japanese partners.

So far, Kamakura Foods has raised “several million US dollars”, according to Chen, including from three venture capital funds, the City University of Hong Kong and Cyberport, the city’s tech incubation centre, where the bento machine is in operation.

Golden Resources, Hong Kong’s major rice trader and one of the investors, said its intention was to “support start-up businesses in food chain extension, food tech and AI applications”, which would add to demand for rice imports to the city. The company, which also runs Circle K convenience stores in Vietnam, has been working with Kamakura Foods to bring its vending machine system into the south-east Asian country.

The next logical step for Kamakura Foods might seem to be mainland China, where wages are rising and automation in the food industry is growing. But that is not on Chen’s mind, as he believes it is a “very different” market. Given limited resources, he wishes to prioritise Japan over China.

Additional reporting by Kensaku Ihara and Peggy Ye

A version of this article was first published by Nikkei Asia on November 16. ©2023 Nikkei Inc. All rights reserved.

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