Sushi Maker Hooks New Distributor

A frozen-pizza manufacturer who had planned to mass-produce quick-frozen sushi for export to a Japanese restaurant chain said this week that he will now sell to a new sushi import company that will distribute the American-made product throughout all of Japan.

Jim Scudder, president of Gourmet Quality Foods, said the new business plans were prompted after the president of Osaka-based Sushi Boy restaurants quit the fast-food restaurant chain to start a new company, Sushi Power.

With that new company, former Sushi Boy executive Fujio Matsumoto will import Escondido-made sushi--produced not by traditional sushi chefs but by robots--for wholesale not only to Sushi Boy restaurants but other buyers as well, Scudder said.

Sushi production is expected to begin in mid-November, and Scudder hopes to ultimately make 500,000 sushi pieces weekly.

The notion of Japanese consumers purchasing mass-produced, fast-frozen sushi--from America, of all places--has raised eyebrows and created some debate in tradition-steeped Japan, but because the imported sushi will be markedly cheaper, some entrepreneurs are willing to give it a try.

The Sushi Boy chain initially announced its desire to buy American sushi because the cost of both rice and fish is substantially cheaper in the United States. Earlier this month, Japanese government officials formally approved the import of sushi--despite its ban on foreign rice--after conceding that sushi is a processed food as long as it contains no more than 80% rice product.

With that bureaucratic breakthrough, Sushi Boy restaurants said it wanted to buy California-made sushi, which would be quick-frozen at the Escondido plant and defrosted just prior to sale to Japanese consumers. Three pieces of the boiled-rice-and-fish pieces would sell for about 80 cents--about half the price of chef-prepared, fresh sushi in Japan.

On Monday, Jun Nakamura of the Sushi Boy chain told the Associated Press in Tokyo that the restaurant had severed its deal with the Escondido sushi plant after Sushi Boy president Matsumoto quit to start his own company.

Nakamura was reported as saying the Escondido plant was in “unusable condition” and incapable of mass-producing sushi and that the chain would look for another American sushi source.

But Scudder, in Escondido, said he is in the process of converting his pizza-making factory to sushi production as well, and will produce sushi in even greater volume for sale to Matsumoto’s Sushi Power.

“It is a better deal for us,” Scudder said. “If we were going to market under the Sushi Boy name, it would have been a problem trying to sell sushi to the restaurants’ competitors as well.

“Now we will sell under a new company name that has nothing to do with Sushi Boy, so we will be able to market our sushi all over,” Scudder said. “We will become the largest exporter of sushi in the United States--if not the only one.”

Scudder said he will hire another 20 people to help with the sushi production but that custom-designed robots will do most of the assembly work.

“We have had a whole lot of sushi chefs come in here and apply for jobs,” Scudder said. “They think they will clap their hands together and pat the rice and put the fish on top of it, and that’s that. Wrong. Robotics will do that.”