Spices, Curry, and Matcha: The Next India-Japan Food Bridge

India Japan Kaizen — Food Bridge Series, Part 1

Japan's population has been shrinking for 16 to 17 years running, and its food industry — built for decades around a large, stable home market — is doing something it rarely had to do before: look outward for growth. Quietly, India's own food processing industry has spent the last several years professionalizing under sustained government investment. And on the ground, ahead of any grand strategy, the two food cultures are already curious about each other. This is the first post in a weekly series on the specific, practical opportunity in food and beverage between the two countries.

Why Japan's Food Industry Is Suddenly Looking at India

The logic is the same one already playing out in autos, semiconductors, and content: a shrinking, ageing home market on one side, and a huge, young, growing one on the other. Kagome set up a tomato-processing factory in India back in 2018, turning Indian-grown tomatoes into pizza sauce and other products, with an explicit plan to build a full value chain there — from raw material to processing to supply network. Kikkoman has been using its own data-backed pairing system, internally called KIP, to work out which Indian ingredients its soy sauce actually goes with. Japan's government has named agriculture and fisheries as priority overseas growth fields for exactly this reason.

Meanwhile, India's Food Processing Industry Has Quietly Leveled Up

India's Production-Linked Incentive Scheme for Food Processing (PLISFPI) has been running since 2021-22 with a ₹10,900 crore (about $1.3 billion) outlay. The results, as of the government's latest figures, have outpaced the original targets: ₹9,207 crore invested against a ₹7,722 crore commitment, roughly 335,000 jobs created against a 250,000 target, and cumulative export sales from scheme beneficiaries reaching ₹89,053 crore (about $10.7 billion) between April 2021 and September 2025 — growing at a 13.23% compound annual rate. Sales of PLI-supported products nearly doubled, from ₹58,758 crore in FY2019-20 to ₹1,08,854 crore in FY2025-26. The practical upshot: India isn't just a source of raw agricultural commodities anymore. It's building the packaging, processing, and quality-control capacity that a Japanese buyer or joint-venture partner can actually plug into.

The Trade That Already Exists, Long Before Any Grand Strategy

None of this is hypothetical — a real, if modest, food relationship already exists in both directions:

• Spices and tea. Japan imported $51.53 million worth of coffee, tea, mate, and spices from India in 2025, up from $46.58 million in 2024 — led by tea ($22.48 million), ginger, saffron, turmeric, thyme, and bay leaves combined ($12.50 million), seeds like cumin and coriander ($8.39 million), and pepper ($3.51 million).
• Curry culture. Tokyo's Shin-Okubo district alone lists more than 44 curry restaurants on Tabelog; naan, butter chicken, and an India-Nepali fusion curry style have become an established dining category in Japan, not a novelty act.
• Processed food investment. Kagome's India tomato-processing plant has been running since 2018; Kikkoman is actively researching India-specific product pairings rather than just exporting a fixed product line.
• Wellness fusion, from both sides. Japan's matcha market, valued at $5.07 billion in 2025 and heading toward $8.86 billion by 2033, is now being blended with turmeric by major brands like ITO EN — at the same time Indian direct-to-consumer brands are mixing matcha with tulsi, moringa, and ashwagandha for the same health-conscious audience. Neither side copied the other; they arrived at the same fusion independently.

Where This Gets Genuinely Hard

Japan's pesticide residue system uses a "positive list": any pesticide not explicitly approved for a given food defaults to a strict 0.01 ppm limit, one of the toughest thresholds in the world, and a real technical wall for Indian exporters used to more lenient standards elsewhere. On the Indian side, an FSSAI Central License functions as the legal food-safety certificate for exports, but Indian exporters generally still need HACCP, ISO 22000, or FSSC 22000 certification layered on top to satisfy Japanese buyers — and there's no dedicated bilateral food-safety or organic-equivalence agreement between the two countries, the kind India already has in place with several other trading partners.

Why This Matters Long Term

For Japan, food companies pursuing India aren't chasing a fad market — they're chasing close to the only realistically large growth market available to an industry built for a shrinking population. Kagome and Kikkoman are early movers, not late ones; the gap between "a few Japanese food companies are interested" and "food is a normal, well-trodden category of Japan-India investment," the way autos or semiconductors already are, is still wide open.

For India, food processing is one of the few sectors where the country can capture more value at home — turning raw turmeric, tea, and tomatoes into finished, branded, exportable products — instead of exporting commodities and importing them back as someone else's finished goods. PLISFPI's own numbers show that capacity is being built regardless of whether Japan shows up to use it; the question is simply who plugs into it first.

And there's a smaller, harder-to-manufacture signal worth naming directly: curry districts in Tokyo and ashwagandha-matcha blends in Mumbai are consumer-level proof that the two food cultures are already curious about each other, well ahead of any formal trade push. That kind of organic curiosity is usually the slowest and hardest thing to build from scratch in a new trade relationship — here, it already exists for free.

What's Missing

Despite Kagome, Kikkoman, and a decade of PLI-driven investment, there's no dedicated India-Japan food-safety or organic-equivalence framework, no visible pipeline of joint ventures beyond a couple of named examples, and nothing like the Japan Industrial Townships or the Japan Plus desk — built specifically for manufacturing — exists yet for food and agri-processing. Most of the real connective tissue right now sits at the restaurant level and the D2C level, not the company level. That's exactly the gap a community-level bridge is useful for: connecting Indian food processors, exporters, and D2C brands with Japanese buyers, distributors, and food companies long before either side has the scale or certainty to justify a dedicated trade desk.

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 1 of India Japan Kaizen's Food Bridge Series, publishing weekly. Part 2 will look closer at specific products and companies already crossing between the two markets — and where the real openings are today.