Mayonnaise, Curry, and Matcha: India's Food Bridge Widens

India Japan Kaizen — Food Bridge Series, Part 2

Part 1 of this series mapped the shape of the opportunity: a shrinking Japan looking outward for growth, an Indian food processing sector that has quietly professionalized under PLISFPI, and a real if modest trade already flowing in both directions — spices and tea heading to Japan, curry culture and matcha-turmeric fusions taking hold on both sides. What that post flagged as missing was a visible pipeline of joint ventures beyond Kagome and Kikkoman. In the month since, four separate developments showed that pipeline starting to fill in: a Japanese mayonnaise maker setting up shop in Haryana, Japan's biggest curry chain formalizing its entry into Delhi even as its own parent company weighs selling it, an Indian state trying to turn its grain surplus into a Japanese-backed processing hub, and an Assam tea garden using a decade of borrowed Japanese machinery expertise to launch a green tea category India has never produced before.

Kewpie Bets on Haryana

On 9 July 2026, Kewpie Corporation — Japan's dominant mayonnaise and dressings maker since 1919 — announced it will establish a wholly owned Indian subsidiary, tentatively named Kewpie India Pvt. Ltd., based in Haryana and starting operations in or after 2027. The initial move is modest by design: a sales and distribution company, capitalized at about ₹11.5 crore (roughly ¥200 million), importing and selling mayonnaise and dressings already made by Kewpie's Asia-Pacific group companies rather than manufacturing locally from day one. But Kewpie isn't stopping at distribution — it is separately planning to invest around ₹200 crore in a food processing plant in Yamuna City, near the upcoming Noida International Airport at Jewar, positioning itself to manufacture in India once the market is proven. Kewpie's own stated logic echoes almost exactly what Part 1 said about Kagome and Kikkoman: rising per-capita GDP, an expanding middle class, and food consumption diversifying fast enough that a company built for a shrinking home market can no longer sit out.

Japan's Biggest Curry Chain Is Coming to Delhi — Even as Its Parent Weighs Selling It

CoCo Ichibanya, Japan's largest curry restaurant chain with roughly 1,500 outlets worldwide, has already entered India through a joint venture with trading house Mitsui & Co. — Mitsui holds 60% and runs business development and franchisee recruitment, while Ichibanya handles store operations and product development, with a stated goal of 30 restaurants in the Delhi region within ten years. That plan is now sitting alongside a separate, much bigger story: on 31 August 2026, Ichibanya's majority owner, House Foods Group, which holds 51%, confirmed it is weighing a sale of the chain, sending Ichibanya's shares up 16% and putting its market value at roughly ¥174.2 billion (about $1.1 billion). Whatever happens to Ichibanya's ownership in Japan, the India joint venture is a separate legal entity with Mitsui already at the controls — a reminder that as these food relationships scale up, they increasingly run on the same corporate-finance logic as any other cross-border investment, not just cultural affinity.

Uttar Pradesh Wants In: A State-Sized Bet on Food Processing

From 18 to 23 August 2026, the UP-Japan Investment Meet in New Delhi brought together more than 200 Japanese industrialists, CEOs, and policymakers around a specific pitch: Uttar Pradesh alone produces roughly 21% of India's total food grain, and the state wants to pair that raw agricultural volume with Japanese processing technology to build what officials described as the world's largest food processing hub. The meet produced ₹3,191 crore in announced projects and continued discussion of a dedicated 500-acre Japanese industrial zone in the state. Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan used the platform to make a specific ask: not just large-scale plants, but affordable Japanese machinery sized for small and marginal farmers — the segment PLISFPI's own numbers suggest has been least able to capture the scheme's gains directly.

Matcha Assamica: The Technology Transfer Running the Other Way

Part 1 described Japan's matcha boom and India's ashwagandha-matcha D2C blends as two cultures arriving at the same fusion independently. What's happened since complicates that story in an interesting way: the 83-year-old Chota Tingrai Tea Estate in Assam's Tinsukia district has launched India's first commercially produced matcha, sold under the name Matcha assamica, with its inaugural lot fetching ₹3,000 per kilogram at the Guwahati Tea Auction Centre. This isn't a copy of Japanese matcha — Assam's Camellia assamica bush produces a bolder, more bitter leaf than Japan's Camellia sinensis, and taming that bitterness to matcha-grade smoothness was the entire technical challenge. The estate got there through a genuine, decade-long technology transfer: a partnership begun in 2016 with Kawasaki Kiko, a Japanese tea-machinery manufacturer, plus roughly three years of on-site guidance from Japanese tea expert Masanori Yanagawa to build a fully automated green tea factory. This runs the opposite direction from the Kagome and Kewpie pattern — instead of a Japanese company selling finished product into India, Japanese processing expertise and machinery came to India to create an entirely new tea category, one aimed as much at the US, European, and West Asian markets as at Japan itself. The timing helps: Japan's own green tea exports hit 13,125 tonnes in fiscal 2025 (the year to March 2026), up 42% by volume and more than doubling in value to ¥84.7 billion, with matcha now accounting for roughly 70% of that export volume. Japan's own matcha supply is straining to keep up with global demand — exactly the gap an Assamese estate producing its own matcha-style tea on licensed Japanese technique is positioned to help fill rather than compete against.

What's Still Missing

None of this closes the two gaps Part 1 identified. There is still no dedicated India-Japan food-safety or organic-equivalence framework — Indian exporters still stack HACCP, ISO 22000, or FSSC 22000 certification on top of an FSSAI license just to clear Japan's strict positive-list pesticide standard, and nothing has emerged in the past month to change that. And while the joint-venture pipeline is visibly thicker than it was a week ago — Kewpie, the Ichibanya-Mitsui venture, Kagome, and Kikkoman are now four named examples instead of two — every one of them is a large company, or a state government pairing with one. There's still no accessible path for a mid-sized Indian food processor, a D2C spice or tea brand, or a Japanese regional confectioner without Mitsui-sized backing to find the other side of this bridge.

If you work in food processing, exports, D2C, or food and beverage retail in India or Japan, and you're curious what this bridge could look like for you — get in touch. This is exactly the kind of introduction India Japan Kaizen wants to help make.

This is Part 2 of India Japan Kaizen's Food Bridge Series, publishing weekly. Part 3 will look at the certification bottleneck itself — what it actually costs an Indian exporter to clear Japan's food-safety bar, and who is trying to bring that cost down.