Virtual view of a part of Takanawa Gateway City, where Maruha Nichiro is opening its restaurant and will also relocate its headquarters next year.
Image: Takanawa Gateway City.
Catching, farming, distributing, buying, selling. Suppose anyone thought they had seen the Japanese seafood giant do it all, Maruha Nichiro opens a new door, this time to its own restaurant, which will be inaugurated in September in Tokyo. Yes, the world's largest seafood company is entering the foodservice sector, and it is doing so with a clear objective: to reshape fish consumption.
A little over a year ago, Maruha Nichiro announced that it was teaming up with East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) to advance 'Planetary Health Diet', a concept of people and planet-friendly food to enrich both people's lives and the planet for the next 100 years. The seafood company thus joined the partnership that JR East and UTokyo had created a few months earlier, in October 2023, the Planetary Health Design Lab (PHD Lab.).
"In welcoming the Maruha Nichiro Group, which has the ability to provide a wide variety of 'food' from the 'sea', to the partnership, we will be able to create a 'Planetary Health Diet' sustainable and enjoyable food of the future that is friendly to both the people and the earth and deliver it throughout Japan and the world from Takanawa Gateway City," then announced a joint press release on their partnership from the three companies.
The food of the future, the release also said, will be created through the combination of Maruha Nichiro's production and distribution network and UTokyo's diverse expertise, available at its Gateway campus, and will be refined through the expertise of JR East's extensive customer network, including Takanawa Gateway City, which will serve as an experimental site with approximately 100,000 visitors, for dissemination in Japan and around the world.
Strategically located above the ultramodern Takanawa Gateway Station in Tokyo, Takanawa Gateway City is not only a new shopping district but also a technological ecosystem with innovation at its core. "Fusion of 'Human Warmth × Digital Functionality'," as defined by shopping mall operator Lumine Inc., which, together with food retail expert Myu Planning, will be Maruha Nichiro's partners in this new gastronomic venture.
The exact location of Lumine & Maruha Nichiro's Sustainable Fish Diet Project will be NEWoMan Takanawa, a commercial facility within Takanawa Gateway City. This innovative space is also where Maruha Nichiro Corporation plans to move its headquarters in 2026, when it will also change its corporate name to Umios. Thus, it will not only be closer to its new restaurant, but also to JR East and UTokyo, its partners in the ‘Planetary Health Diet’.
Speaking about NEWoMan Takanawa - which it describes as "an urban oasis where every visit becomes a sensory adventure" - the Spanish travel magazine 'wanderer' says that there coexist "green spaces that embrace exclusive boutiques, cafes that are true works of art, and restaurants that reinvent gastronomy."
And that is precisely what Maruha Nichiro intends to do with its first restaurant: remodeling fish as food. Co-developed with Lumine and Myu Planning, and themed 'One Fish a Day', it will focus on sustainable, enjoyable fish-based diets, contributing to the 'Planetary Health Diet' movement.
By combining UTokyo's knowledge of artificial intelligence, fisheries science, and customer psychology in an interdisciplinary way, the initiative will work towards the revaluation and rebranding of fish as a food to expand its consumption in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. Moreover, while producing future's fish as food, it will also aim to deliver fresh and easy-to-handle fish to customers.
If the inconveniences of purchasing, cooking, and other processes make it easy to resort to meat, by simplifying the search for fish that meets the customer's needs, fish will be easy to select as a culinary ingredient. The ultimate goal is, in a way, to change the way we live.
"From upstream to downstream, this effort promotes 'Planetary Health' through enjoyable, sustainable lifestyles," Lumine's release claimed. "We will work to solve social issues involving food loss and food shortage problems as well as consumer health issues by expanding the consumption of fish while reducing environmental impacts such as marine pollution and CO2 emissions."
But how do they intend to do this? When announcing its participation in the project, Maruha Nichiro explained that it would do so through specific initiatives. These include, for example, the development of tasty, boneless, and nutritious fish as food that stays fresh longer and is easy to prepare, or the development of tools that show the freshness and benefits of the fish on display, but also the aforementioned transformation of fish into an ingredient that requires less culinary skills, reducing its strong taste and with 100% utilization.
Others, the company said, will involve the timely supply of easy-to-cook fish through new aquaculture systems and farmed fish. Its recent announcement on the commercialization of a new aquaculture species - cobia, known in Japan as "sugi" - to meet challenges such as rising seawater temperatures and higher feed prices, is one example.
Although its farming is still in the experimental period, with this development, Maruha Nichiro said it seeks to establish cobia as the fourth key pillar of aquaculture after bluefin tuna, yellowfin tuna, and greater amberjack (kanpachi) by integrating production and sales across the group.
Opening a venue to take on the challenge of 'Planetary Health Diet' is another step in that strategy. The idea behind opening a restaurant in Takanawa Gateway City is that people will have the opportunity to taste the food created from that concept. "It will be a location for both practical implementation and experimentation to fully realize the collaborative creative vision of the three institutions," the Japanese seafood giant said.
That is, Maruha Nichiro's global value chain and product development capabilities, the University of Tokyo's goal of creating a new future through dialogue, and East Japan Railway's extensive network of customers, united to build a future for both oceans and life.
"The partnership will work to enrich the Earth for the next 100 years, researching, then implementing initiatives on how to re-design the culture of fish as food from multiple perspectives, including nutrition, personal preferences, and functionality," Maruha Nichiro's release concluded.
