Cafeteria To Consumer — How Indian Workers In Japan Drove Suzuki's Unexpected Culinary Diversification

Suzuki has been selling instant Indian vegetarian curries to a Japanese market since July 2025— all because of its efforts to make its Indian employees working in Japan feel less homesick.

At Suzuki, employees from India mainly work in the engineering departments in Japan, with the company reporting plans to increase the number of foreign employees, including highly skilled workers.

In order to soothe the longing that its Indian employees had for food from back home, Suzuki decided to offer vegetarian Indian curries in its cafeterias since January 2024.

The automotive firm partnered with Torizen, a 150-year-old restaurant in the same city of Hamamatsu as the company and developed kits for food service workers to use in order for them to serve Indian vegetarian curries.

Although the news is only now being publicised outside the company, curry meals have been offered to Suzuki employees at its factory cafeteria in Japan since early 2024. Working with Torizen, kits for food service providers were developed that enable them to serve Indian vegetarian dishes with simple cooking.

Suzuki reported that months of taste tests were conducted by it to hone in on authentic Indian flavours.

After noticing the popularity of their products, Suzuki decided to commercialise them, introducing the 'Suzuki Cafeteria Indian Vegetarian Curry' to the Japanese market. They were launched in June 2025, in a ready-to-eat format. All customers need to do to prepare their product is to buy it in packets and boil it in water.

Four different curries have been offered by the company in daikon radish sambar, tomato lentil, chickpea masala, and moong dal green options, according to reports. Each packet costs ¥918, which comes close to roughly Rs 500.

The packets have illustrations of Suzuki's flagship motorcycles and cars. Automotive journalist Kushan Mitra drew attention to this in a post on social media platform 'X'.

"Fascinating, Suzuki enters the pre-packaged food business in Japan. They’ve launched four new packaged Indian curries and in four months they’ve sold 100,000 packets and they plan to expand to 14 different types of curry in the coming months. This ‘business diversification’ was born out of the fact that there are over 200 Indian employees at Suzuki Headquarters for whom Indian meals are prepared daily," Mitra said.