[imagesource: Oishii]

In Japan, strawberries on the dining room table signal that a special occasion is about to be celebrated.

Likewise with any fruit really, as they are all grown with the most nuanced tender love and care, making them a luxury that not many can afford on the island country.

As far as Japanese culture goes, it is not enough to make something well; rather, one has to master their vocation and turn it into an art.

This can definitely be said about Hiroki Koga and Brendan Somerville’s strawberry company, Oishii, which means ‘delicious’ in Japanese.

A bright red strawberry seems to promise delectable sweetness and juiciness, but never quite like how Oishii’s version, dubbed “the Tesla of strawberries”, does:

Fast Company‘s Joe Berkowitz is certainly a fan:

These berries tasted more like candy than fruit, and practically liquified on first chew. They were incredible, almost unbelievable.

…It was the flavour-promise made by every previous strawberry I’d ever had, utterly fulfilled, and with a subtly insistent sweetness that stopped just short of confectionary.

They’re compared to Elon Musk’s pioneering brand because the pair of MBA students started out their company with a luxury product at the forefront, only later extending into the mass market.

Also, Oishii has used technology in impressive ways to make these little red jewels possible.

Robots scour the flowers and fruits in the greenhouse to make sure everything is on track, and to ensure that the bees are pollinating and that the juices are flowing:

 

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Most of all, they make use of vertical farming in ways that have really elevated the sustainable foods market, helping to provide a kind of berry that had never been grown in the United States before:

They may hold the key to ridding America’s most pesticide-riddled fruit of pesticides, not to mention the unconscionable amount of fossil fuels it takes to grow strawberries year-round with traditional farm equipment and then ship them from California or Latin America.

Koga refers to Oishii’s strawberries as “the holy grail” of vertical farming because they’re difficult to make taste so delectable and everybody loves them the most out of all the fruits.

Vertical farming allows all those possibilities to come to fruition:

Koga and Somerville had spent a good few days selling their special strawberry flavour to all the best chefs in New York when they came to a realisation:

[Soon after that they] returned to the city in the fall of 2018 with their own invention: the Omakase berry. It not only replicated the taste of the berries they’d imported from Japan, but also purportedly took 90% less land and zero pesticides to do so.

The fire-engine red Omakase berries, named after a Japanese phrase that loosely translates to “leave it to the chef,” have a plasticine shine and recessed seeds so deep and evenly spaced they risk inducing trypophobia.

They carry a floral perfume that fills a room right away, and yield to even the slightest bite. The sweetness of each berry is measured using the brix scale, with most of them reportedly registering at 13 or 14 brix—more than double the typical strawberry.

Whether it is Omakase’s eyebrow-raising $50 for a tray of eight price tag, or the impressive taste, people can’t help but talk about Oishii’s strawberries.

If you’re interested in knowing more, there’s a longer read waiting for you here.

[source:fastcompany]