SUSHI – GENUINE JAPANESE FOOD IN DANISH

SUSHI: A small Danish company in Copenhagen has made sushi a popular attraction in Danish supermarkets. Their formula is based on Japanese tradition, with the added Danish quality of rationality and industrialisation. In two years, production of sushi pieces has increased from 4 million to more than 20 million annually. And consumers love it.

EPA Foods A/S, the company which has challenged Danish taste buds with its ready made sushi packs, is run by a young restaurant owner, Anders P. Christensen. The concept of selling through supermarkets has had such great success that he has expanded his business into German discount chains, and Swedish and Norwe-gian supermarkets.

“10 years ago I knew nothing about su-shi – nor did many Danes,” says Anders P. Christensen. “But during a visit to Hawaii I tasted sushi for the first time, and was completely sold on it. At that time I owned a number of restaurants in Copenhagen. When I came home I tried to find a sushi restaurant in Copenhagen, but could not find one. Then I sold my restaurants and put all my resources into a brand new sushi restaurant. It is called Sushitarian and is one of the oldest sushi restaurants in Denmark.”

Japanese authenticity
Anders P. Christensen wanted to do it the right way from the beginning, so his first step was to travel to Los Angeles, which is the one place outside of Japan where sushi has become part of the lifestyle. Here he contacted Andy Matsuda, California’s most prominent sushi chef. Together they developed a concept where Andy Matsuda trained some cooks over six months, who then joined Anders P. Christensen. They passed on their skills in Copenhagen, and then returned to California where they formed part of a roster in other sushi restaurants. The concept has become a great success with many cooks trained over time who both maintain the original traditions and also understand how to use local ingredients to adjust the sushi to various national taste perceptions.

“Shushitarian was an immediate success in Copenhagen,” says Anders P. Christensen. “It also helped initiate a demand outside the restaurants. Many people saw it as take-away food. So I thought, why not sell sushi directly from the supermarket?”

Untraditional supermarket wares
One of the big problems in selling sushi through supermarkets is shelf life and sell-by date. The combination of rice and raw fish or shellfish react against each other. In order for the rice, which is the actual ingredient of sushi, to be right, it must be freshly made. And to conform with legislation, raw fish must not be sold without being chilled to at least 2°C. When sushi rice is chilled to 2°C, it loses all its elegant and delicate properties in a very short time.

“From the beginning we chose a shelf life of two days from production to sell-by date,” says Anders P. Christensen. “The demand for such rapid turnover in shops made it difficult, but fortunately there was a supermarket chain in Denmark which gave it a chance, and they have not regretted it. Today the short shelf life is not an issue. Most of it is sold on the first day and the rest on the second day.”

Luxury variations
The sushi products are mostly sold in standard packs of 10 pieces – 6 pieces of nigiri and 4 maki rolls. They are produced overnight, packed at dawn and distributed during the morning. Together with the 10 pieces, the packs are supplied with soya sauce, preserved ginger, wasabi and chopsticks. The ingredients for nigiri, the rice pieces with raw fish, are in addition to the original Japanese rice: trout, salmon, halibut, large Asian shrimps, marlin and tuna. The maki rolls feature e.g. trout roe and Tamago, which is Japanese omelette.

“In line with a dramatic increase in sales we have started developing various luxury variants which satisfy a progressively more demanding consumer segment,” says Christensen. “The sushi restaurants, take-away places and supermarket offers support each other. A restaurant visit on Saturdays persuades people to buy sushi in supermarkets on Mondays. And the temptations from the supermarket on Tuesdays gets people to discover new things in the restaurants on Wednesdays. And so on. That means we must constantly renew the offers in supermarkets to keep up with consumer wishes.”

Anders P. Christensen does however acknowledge that there are limitations.

“There are so many things that we cannot make industrially, which a sushi chef can dazzle restaurant guests with. The objective is to produce genuine products at industrial prices, accepting the limitations this imposes. But there are still lots of development opportunities and challenges.”

http://www.tasteoftokyo.dk