Luxury strawberries, grown indoors
Japanese strawberries, grown in a former plastics factory in New Jersey, pollinated by bees that never see the sky, and picked by robots.
In Japan, a perfect strawberry can be a gift, presented in a box like jewellery. Growing up in Tokyo, Hiroki Koga took that for granted. Moving to America, he discovered that most strawberries there are bred to survive long journeys, not to taste extraordinary. Oishii, whose name means "delicious" in Japanese, is his answer.
A consultant who had seen the future, and its failures
Before he was a farmer, Koga was a consultant at Deloitte in Tokyo, where part of his work involved helping large companies set up vertical farms: indoor farms where crops grow on stacked shelves under artificial light. He saw the technology's promise up close, and he also watched the Japanese industry go through a boom and bust, with many farms closing.
In 2015 he moved to California for an MBA at UC Berkeley, where he studied vertical farming startups for investors and met his co-founder, Brendan Somerville. In 2016 they started Oishii with a clear lesson from Japan: the problem with most vertical farms was not the technology. It was what they chose to grow.
The "Tesla approach"
Most vertical farms grow lettuce and herbs. Those are easy to grow indoors, but they are cheap to buy, so the expensive lights and equipment rarely pay off. Koga went the other way. He chose one of the hardest crops to grow indoors, Japanese strawberries, and sold them as a luxury.
Koga has compared it to Tesla's strategy: start with an expensive, exceptional product for a small group of customers, build the brand and the know-how, then bring the price down over time. The first product, the Omakase Berry, launched in 2018 for New York restaurants and grocers at $50 for a tray of eight. The price made headlines. The headlines made the brand. Photos of perfect berries in white boxes spread across Instagram.
Most vertical farms tried to grow cheap food expensively. Oishii grew expensive food beautifully.
Bees, robots and the Japanese Alps
The farms are designed to recreate the conditions of the Japanese regions where the varieties originate, adjusting around 20 factors such as light, temperature, humidity and airflow. The strangest part is pollination. Strawberries need it, and Oishii became the first company in the United States to make pollinator bees work reliably indoors, with entire hives living inside the farm. As its finance chief has put it: if the bees aren't there, you get zero fruit. Getting that right took years.
Alongside the bees are machines. Oishii built its own harvesting robots, which use cameras and AI to judge when each berry is perfectly ripe and pick it around the clock.
Growing through a crash
In 2021, Oishii raised $50 million from investors including the Sony Innovation Fund and a fund backed by Toyota. Then vertical farming hit hard times: several heavily funded competitors shut down as energy costs rose and lettuce economics failed. Koga had seen this cycle before in Japan.
While others were closing, Oishii raised $134 million in February 2024, led by the Japanese telecoms giant NTT. The same year it opened Amatelas, a huge farm near Phillipsburg, New Jersey, built in a former plastics factory. It runs on solar power, recycles most of its water, and uses around 50 robots. Prices have come down to roughly $11 to $15 a pack, and the berries are sold at Whole Foods stores on the East Coast and served in Michelin-starred restaurants. The company has started growing tomatoes and experimenting with melons.
The strategy: better first, cheaper later
Oishii's long-term goal is simple to state and hard to do: produce fruit that is many times better than the conventional version, at the same price. Its route there is a ladder. Start at the top with a luxury product that funds the research. Use each new, larger farm to cut costs. Then add tiers, from special-occasion boxes to everyday packs, so more people can afford it. Every step down in price is also a step up in scale.
What has to go right
Indoor farming uses a lot of energy, and even solar power does not make it free. The company needs each new farm to be cheaper per berry than the last. Luxury fruit is a small market, so growth depends on becoming affordable without losing the magic that made people pay $50 in the first place. And it must keep its quality as it grows from a boutique into a big business.
Why it matters
Oishii shows that the same technology can fail or succeed depending on the strategy around it. Vertical farming did not need better lights as much as it needed a better answer to the question: what is worth growing indoors?
Would you pay more for the perfect strawberry?
