Hiroki Koga

What the Center is built to solve
“The Center is designed to address some of the fundamental challenges that come with making indoor agriculture more scalable and productive, including farming systems, cultivation technologies, sustainability, crop quality and flavor,” Hiroki says. “It gives us a dedicated environment to bring together expertise from agriculture, manufacturing, robotics and emerging technologies to tackle them.”

“Over the next several years, success will ultimately mean translating that research into meaningful advances in how we grow: improving productivity and sustainability while continuing to deliver the quality and flavor that consumers expect from Oishii,” he says. “We see the three- to five-year horizon as an opportunity to build the capabilities and partnerships that can have a lasting impact on the future of indoor agricultur
The hardest part of scaling
For Hiroki, the biggest barrier to competing economically at scale isn’t farm size. “Our experience has shown us that scaling isn’t simply about building larger farms. It requires continued advances in cultivation, automation, robotics, infrastructure and other technologies that allow us to produce high-quality crops more efficiently,” he says. “Consistent quality, pesticide-free growing, and year-round supply are three benefits that vertical farming can bring. Integrating more automation and advances in data-driven environment management will make these advantages even more important.”

Oishii is moving away from building each farm largely from scratch, toward a standardized model it can deploy without site-specific development. “The goal of the Open Innovation Center is to bring together different areas of expertise and apply those learnings to the way we operate and scale our smart farms,” Hiroki says. “We have an opportunity to test and learn across different environments and bring those insights back into our production in the US. Research around cultivation, robotics, pest and disease control, refrigeration, and other technologies can inform improvements to both existing operations and the design of future facilities.”

“We aim to build the foundation for global expansion by developing a turnkey solution for vertical farms, packaging the necessary technologies, equipment, and systems into a standardized solution that can be deployed anywhere without requiring site-specific development. To date, we have built our farms largely in-house, combining off-the-shelf equipment with technologies and systems we developed ourselves in the US. Going forward, we will develop equipment and systems specifically designed for vertical farming. Think of it like flat-pack furniture: a standardized, ready-to-assemble solution that can be deployed efficiently in different locations.”

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The NTT collaboration
Oishii’s collaboration with NTT, the Japanese telecommunications company and an Oishii investor, is one example. “Our work with NTT showcases the type of cross-disciplinary collaboration we want the Center to enable,” Hiroki says. “We are exploring optical approaches to pest and disease control, as well as voltage-controlled refrigeration technology that could help extend strawberry freshness and quality. At this stage, the focus is on understanding how these technologies can be applied effectively within indoor agriculture. Over time, we see potential for innovations like these to help us improve the efficiency and precision of our operations while protecting the quality of the crop.”

“Our Series C is enabling us to invest across both R&D and commercial growth,” Hiroki says. “The business we’ve built in the US over the past decade has shown us where the biggest opportunities for innovation are, and we believe continued investment in those areas is essential to scaling responsibly. Our growing commercial footprint gives us the opportunity to put those innovations into practice and learn from them in real-world production environments.”

What Japan brings to the US playbook
“One of the reasons we established the Open Innovation Center in Japan is because of its exceptional expertise in both agriculture and manufacturing,” Hiroki says. “We see an opportunity to combine what we’ve learned operating our smart farms in the US with Japan’s strengths.”

The Center’s research agenda already extends past Oishii’s core crop. “Strawberries are at the heart of what we do today, but we’re already looking at how our technology and expertise can translate to other crops, including tomatoes. The Center gives us a place to R&D new crops and explore what it takes to grow them with the same focus on quality, flavor, and efficiency. Over time, we see that work expanding the possibilities for what can be grown indoors.”