Oishii Farm Opens Its First Japan R&D Hub and Plans to Sell Strawberries in the Country It Learned From

What happened

On 5 August 2026, Oishii Farm held the opening ceremony for its “Open Innovation Center” in Hamura City, on Tokyo’s western edge. It is the US vertical strawberry grower’s first dedicated research and development facility in Japan. We have followed the company since its Series C round.

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Agriculture Minister Norikazu Suzuki and Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike both attended. According to Oishii’s own account of the ceremony, Koike described Tokyo as a huge consumer market where food can reach people fresh, spoke about food security, and called robot-equipped plant factories a trump card for the city’s problems.

On the same day, Oishii announced that it will produce and sell in Japan. Sales are planned to start within 2026, through wholesale, retail and restaurant partners. CEO Hiroki Koga was reported as saying that Hamura is formally a research site but already produces a considerable volume of fruit. Pricing and distribution have not been announced. Once sales begin, Japan will be Oishii’s third market after the US and Canada.

Why Japan, why now

There is a supply problem behind the timing. Strawberries are scarce and expensive in Japanese summers, and reporting on the opening linked the summer price spikes to climate-related supply problems. The heat itself is documented. The Japan Meteorological Agency recorded 2025 as the country’s hottest summer since national record-keeping began in 1898. Food prices rose 5.6% that year, against 3.2% for the overall consumer price index. Oishii’s indoor-grown fruit does not depend on the weather, and that summer gap is what it is aimed at.

Field-grown berries also carry a different risk: contamination. That has been a problem well outside Japan, as our coverage of Europe’s 2026 berry recalls showed.

Policy points the same way. The Takaichi administration has named seventeen sectors as strategically important for growth, and food tech, including vertical farming, is one of them. The investment roadmap for those sectors puts combined public and private investment in plant factories at ¥4.6 trillion through fiscal 2040. That figure belongs to the plant factory strategy we examine in our standardization report. None of this targets Oishii directly. It does mean the company is opening its Japan R&D hub while the government is trying to make this kind of investment easier.

A Japanese-rooted company, investing back into Japan

Oishii’s story is usually told the other way around: a startup headquartered in New Jersey that applies Japanese cultivation know-how to the US market. CEO Hiroki Koga was born in Japan, worked there as a vertical farm consultant, then moved to the US for an MBA at UC Berkeley. He has described Oishii’s founding goal as bringing Japanese fruit culture to American consumers. Hamura reverses that. Expertise that started in Japan and was commercialized abroad now pays for research infrastructure in the country it came from.

The crop choice follows the same logic. Much of Japan’s earlier generation of plant factories grew leafy greens, a low-margin, price-sensitive category behind a good share of the industry’s well-documented startup economics problem. Oishii has stayed away from greens entirely. It chose a harder technical problem instead, pollinated fruit sold at a premium.

Hamura’s work builds on that choice. Oishii says the center runs with more than 50 partners from industry, government and academia. Its agenda covers turning plant factories into a standardized package, raising productivity and sustainability, improving flavor, and growing new kinds of fruit and vegetables. Press reports add that it is testing hundreds of strawberry varieties with seed and seedling companies and developing farm equipment such as sensors and climate control.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

An R&D center opening is modest news by itself. Oishii is not building in isolation, though. Japan has spent sixteen years assembling an industrial base, standards bodies and capital relationships, and a foreign-flagged, Japanese-led company like Oishii can now plug into all of it. The government’s ¥4.6 trillion investment outlook for plant factories suggests that base will keep growing.

To judge what Oishii is walking into, it helps to know how the sector formed. Its best-known pioneers filed for bankruptcy and kept operating under new ownership, which is not how the collapses of CEA pioneers elsewhere ended. It also helps to know what “standardization” means in practice for a newcomer trying to scale here.

We have mapped those sixteen years in our independent research report, Japan’s Plant Factory Standardization. This article assumes that context.

Further reading

• Oishii’s $150M Series C: What Investors Can Learn From the Premium Berry Strategy
• Inside Japan’s Plant Factory Boom: What the Government Roadmap Actually Says
• Vertical Farming Food Safety: What the 2026 Berry Recalls Reveals