The summit was at an interesting moment: a record 42.7 million international visitors came in 2025, and Americans are one of the fastest-growing groups. At the same time, Japan is looking to leverage its longtime culture of innovation in food.

Many of international travelers come for Japan’s culture, arts and, above all, its food. They bring those tastes home with them, resulting in a boomerang effect. Japan’s agricultural, fishery, and food exports hit a record $10.9 billion in 2025, with the largest market being the US. There are now more than 180,000 Japanese restaurants outside Japan, up from about 118,000 in 2017.

Matcha is the clearest example of how Japanese tastes are coming to the world. Green tea exports doubled in 2025, driven largely by the global matcha boom. That boom has meant that the industry is growing without internationally shared definitions or standards for matcha, dishonest players are mislabeling their product, and supply is struggling to keep up with demand.

During the conference, I met dozens of leaders who are shaping the future of food. I tasted plant-based foods that will change the way we think about nutrition. I also spoke on a panel about developing the next generation of food innovators, focusing on how entrepreneurs build systems thinking. The conversations centered on three questions: how to build toward new food industries, how to scale innovation, and where to invest for a healthier planet and healthier people.

The Japanese government is putting money behind those questions. In November 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government named food tech as one of 17 strategic fields for public-private investment, and a draft roadmap projects roughly $60 billion in food tech investment through 2040. This is playing out in myriad ways. Tokyo’s real estate developers are building food innovation into the city itself, including a gastronomy innovation campus with Spain’s Basque Culinary Center. Meanwhile, the government is pushing to help Japanese food innovators break into Western markets.

My Five Takeaways

1. Technology is driving rapid change, and it’s coming from everywhere at once

AI is an obvious driver of change, from giving us a better understanding of how the body responds to different ingredients to integration with smart appliances to the development of new kitchen robotics. One presenter described how smart appliances can now talk to each other, building meals from what’s already in your refrigerator then doing the cooking. Funny enough, this is exactly what we were predicting almost 20 years ago when I worked on the Microsoft Home of the Future project. Cheap sensors, Internet of Things, and AI have finally connected the dots.

2. Longevity is becoming a food category

Japan is the leading edge of a global trend. Nearly 30% of the population is 65 or older, and the number of centenarians passed 100,000 for the first time this year.

Innovators have to think about what longevity means when a large share of the population may live well into their 90s and beyond. “Longevity food” and new foods for an aging society were featured themes at the summit. I noticed an interesting difference between the US and Japan here. In the US, much of the longevity conversation is about how we can engineer our bodies or our lives to live longer. In Japan, the focus is much more on the foods, ingredients, and compounds that can help elders live healthier lives as they age. In other words, foods can be engineered to help aging bodies rather than trying to short circuit the aging process.

3. Food is getting more personal

Technology is opening up new ways to understand how food interacts with each individual’s body. Two people can eat the same meal and respond very differently in blood sugar, energy, and digestion, and the tools that measure those differences are moving out of the lab and into everyday life.

Continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and at-home microbiome and biomarker tests now give people near-real-time feedback on how their bodies respond to what they eat. AI is the layer that makes that data useful, turning readings into meal suggestions, shopping lists, recipes, and potentially connecting them to the smart kitchen appliances I described above.

In Japan, this ties naturally to longevity. Personalized nutrition is less about optimizing performance and more about helping older adults stay strong and independent: getting enough protein to prevent frailty, managing salt, and making food easier to chew and swallow without losing flavor.

For food companies, the implications are significant. Products will increasingly be designed for specific needs, such as blood sugar management, gut health or healthy aging. But there are hard questions too: who owns personal data, how strong is the science behind the recommendations, and will personalized nutrition reach everyone or only the affluent?

I expected to hear more about GLP1s, but they haven’t penetrated the market yet, partly because of strong regulation, but also because Japan’s food culture and healthy eating habits.

4. Ingredient science: new taste technology and an ancient technique

One Japanese company, Toy Medical, is developing seaweed-derived alginates, a type of dietary fiber that binds to salt in the digestive tract so that more of it passes through the body rather than being absorbed. The company says this can cut salt absorption by about 30%, which is important in a country where miso and soy sauce are staples. I could see many applications of this product in food manufacturing in the US as well, where added salts are also a health problem.

Tomorrow Inc., a California-based company, is developing protein-based taste ingredients modeled on sweet proteins found in nature. This lets companies include the taste of a sweetener while not adding sugar. The company is also working on taste proteins that mimic salty, creamy, spicy, and cooling sensations. This might allow people to drink water that tastes cold in place without refrigeration.

Fermentation is the other big ingredient story, and Japan has a head start. Japan has always had a strong fermentation tradition: soy sauce, tamari, miso, sake, and natto (fermented soybeans, which is a VERY acquired taste if you didn’t grow up with it). Much of it rests on koji, the mold culture Japanese producers have refined over centuries.
Interest in fermentation is growing in the US and other Western countries because of its gut health benefits and depth of flavor without needing sugar, salt, or fat.

5. On land and at sea, Japan’s food supply is under pressure, and adapting

Sustainable sourcing practices aren’t yet as prevalent for many Japanese food brands, so there’s an opportunity for Japanese companies to learn from Western companies. I was surprised to see less focus on regenerative agriculture or agtech apps to help farmers. That may reflect the small number of farms in Japan, but given the aging farm workforce, it could also be an area where investment is badly needed.

The same pressure shows up at sea. Japan’s fisheries and aquaculture output fell in 2025 to its lowest level since 1956, and there’s growing recognition that wild fisheries won’t be around forever. Aquaculture and blue foods are where much of the energy is going.

Numerous companies are using seaweed as an ingredient or focusing on sustainable seaweed farming. Land-based aquaculture is one of the government’s four food tech priorities. One company, ARK Inc., has developed modular, closed-loop tanks for growing grouper and other fish alongside farming operations, giving farmers an added income stream. Its smallest systems fit in about the space of a parking spot. The company recently opened a hub in Malaysia to expand across Southeast Asia and the Global South.

Looking Ahead

The message I took away from Tokyo is that the next wave of food innovation won’t come from a single breakthrough. It will come from connections: between technology and tradition, between startups and large companies, and between Japan and the rest of the world. Japan’s challenges (an aging population, a shrinking farm workforce, declining fisheries) are ones many countries will face soon. The solutions being built there are worth watching closely.

If you’re a Japanese food innovator thinking about the US market, or a Western company looking to Japan for ideas, I’d love to compare notes.