Chapter 9: Are We Eating Well?
From Tanegashima to the World — Chapter 9 of 10
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Chapter 9: Are We Eating Well?
Are we really eating to live?
Sometimes I stop and ask myself this. I wonder whether the food world has slowly trained us to accept something a little strange as if it were normal.
We say we eat to live.
But if that were really true — why are there so many foods designed only to get us through the day, and so few designed to actually keep us well?
The Generation That Ate to Work
After the Second World War, the world worked itself into prosperity. My father was, in many ways, a symbol of that generation — Japanese, relentless, driven.
He used to say that, in those years, food was about one thing: fill the stomach, fuel the work.
For that time, perhaps that was enough.
But is that still enough, now?
Are we really eating to live? Or have we just gotten quietly used to food that exists only to keep the day moving?
That question sits at the centre of Otogo.
What Otogo Wants to Deliver
What we want to offer is simple, and important.
- Clean energy you can put into your body, easily.
- Food eaten with understanding, not guilt.
- Food that genuinely supports the way you work, and the way you live.
That is the customer lifestyle Otogo is shaped around.
What’s Actually In the Food
- Rice — carefully selected Japanese rice. Tastes good cold. Grown without leaning on more pesticides than necessary. Gentle on the body.
- Soba flour — sourced from New South Wales, milled in-house using a Japanese machine.
- Drinks — every craft drink is made by crushing fresh fruit ourselves and turning it into syrup. No unnecessary additives.
- Sauces — almost everything made in-house. The exception is a few egg-based sauces, which the current Sydney setup makes hard to produce internally. Everything else: clean.
I want Otogo to be food I can give my own children without feeling guilty.
And it is not only about my own family.
I do not want to hand the next generation a food culture that they will look back on and feel ashamed of. I want to leave behind a chain that, when our children grow up and have children of their own, they will want to feed them too.
Not “the special Japanese meal you have on a treat day”.
A daily, reliable piece of infrastructure that supports a healthy life.
We want to be Reliable.
That is what Otogo is doing.
The Details That Compound
- For the same volume, rice tends to be lower in calories than wheat-based bread.
- For the same volume, soba is significantly lower in calories than ramen.
- Otogo’s craft drinks contain less sugar than supermarket juices.
- Our salmon is fresh Tasmanian salmon — not canned.
- Soba flour is from New South Wales.
- Unnecessary additives: kept out, as far as we can manage.
We stack details like these, day after day.
The Honest Question
Naturally, people ask:
With ingredients that careful, can you really get close to McDonald’s prices?
The honest answer is: in principle, yes — but only with volume.
Which is why we bought the onigiri machine. Why we bought the soba machine. Why our onigiri fillings are batched in convection ovens that handle 500-plus servings at a time. Why our craft-drink syrups are made 200-plus servings at a time. Why we picked compact equipment so the upfront investment did not balloon.
We have worked hard.
And we are still not at McDonald’s prices yet.
Why?
Because the back-end costs are still there.
What customers see is a product. What sits behind that product is something else entirely — labour, operations design, waste management, systems, data, training, forecasting, the choreography of production itself.
That is the real fight.
The Conviction
But I am certain about one thing.
If a person could get a warm Japanese meal, free of unnecessary additives, at the same price as McDonald’s, they would choose it.
Not because it was trendy. Not because it felt premium. But because it was a more natural, more reassuring choice — for themselves, and for their families.
Lower than the threshold of a fine-dining restaurant. Closer to the steady reassurance of a price you can count on.
That new sense of agreement — yes, this is what I want to eat, every day — is what we want to spark, all over the world.
So we cannot give up here.
The Next Battle
The next challenge is to arm Otogo with AI.
The Otogo DX era is beginning.
Inside my head, this is what Otogo is meant to be:
The flavour — old, good Japan. The kitchen — fast food from the 22nd century.
And we are, genuinely, trying to build it.
Continue to Chapter 10: The Day Otogo Opened — and Everything Broke at Once →