Last week, I was in Japan to meet clients and get a taste of the growing agrifood innovation ecosystem there. Now that I am back, I thought it would be good to focus on the two faces of Japan’s agrifood innovations: its startups and large food companies. Indeed, if we are honest, Japan isn’t the first country that comes to mind when we think about FoodTech. However, in recent years, we have observed an increased activity that deserves a lot more attention than it currently gets.

A rising Japanese FoodTech ecosystem

First, if we look at investments in Japanese FoodTech startups, we see that they have not followed the pattern observed globally: a steady increase until 2020, an explosion in 2021 and 2022, and then a sharp decrease. As you can see on the graph below, it’s quite the opposite of what was observed in Japan, with a bottom reached in 2021. Since then, things have improved, with about $255M invested in 2024.

To put that in comparison, this is only about half what was invested in the UK, and still much less than the funding in countries like Finland or the Netherlands. However, that’s much better than most countries in Asia.

There are now Japanese startups in almost all key FoodTech categories:

• Alternative proteins with *Daiz,** which develops a new texturised plant-based meat from germinated soybeans, IntegriCulture (cellular agriculture), *Kinish* (molecular farming to produce dairy proteins through engineered rice).
• Agriculture with players active in methane reduction, vertical farming, robotics (Agrist) and aquaculture.
• Foodservice & delivery with Dinii (an operating system for restaurants) and *Peco Free* (meal pre-ordering and delivery for schools).

On the weak side, Japan’s FoodTech startups are still mostly focused only on Japan. However, the emergence of this B2B-driven ecosystem backed by strong R&D from universities, increased support for the tech sector from the government, and a network of global food corporations could help them internationalise.

Large Japanese agrifood players acting as scale-up partners

While Japanese startups have not yet emerged as global players, Japanese agrifood corporate giants are themselves increasingly partnering with international startups. For example, if we look at the case of Ajinomoto, in the past couple of years, it announced partnerships with:

• Solar Foods (Finland) to use its sustainable protein (made through biomass fermentation by transforming captured carbon into a source of raw protein) into innovative food products in Singapore.
• Standing Ovation (France) to support the scale-up of the production of its caseins made through precision fermentation.
• Shiru (USA) to commercialise new sweet proteins.

Beyond this case, there is a growing number of large agrifood Japanese companies investing or partnering.

Coming from France, I can only see some similarities. First, the two countries share a deep passion for food and tradition, which may have slowed the emergence of FoodTech startups. After all, why try to disrupt something which is already working so well? In recent years, however, French FoodTech startups have really emerged and shown that there is a path between tradition and modernity for food. From what I have seen from Japanese entrepreneurs, investors and large companies, there is the potential to create what could become a FoodTech hub. That’s why you should put Japan on your map of the geographies to watch!