Hiroki Koga

A fruit so precise it comes with eating instructions

Eat the Omakase Berry from the side, not the tip. Hiroki Koga will tell you this himself, because the sweetness distributes differently across the berry and he has thought about it more than you have thought about anything today. This is the level of attention behind Oishii, the company he co-founded in 2016 to grow Japanese strawberries inside buildings in New Jersey - and the reason chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants once paid roughly fifty dollars for a tray of eight.

Koga runs the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. That sentence sounds like a press release until you realize almost no one else in vertical farming grows fruit at all. The industry runs on lettuce, kale, basil - leafy greens that grow fast, need no pollination, and rarely make anyone money. Koga looked at that consensus and walked the other way. "We started with strawberries because we felt it was a high-value-add crop, a stronger cash flow and a better business model," he has said. Strawberries were the hardest thing to grow at scale. That was the point.

The consultant who saw the crash coming

Before he was a strawberry founder, Koga was a strategy consultant at Deloitte in Japan, where he started in 2009 working on pharma and biotech before steering the firm into agriculture technology. He also did due diligence on vertical-farm investments for venture firms. So when the rest of the world got dazzled by glowing racks of indoor lettuce, Koga had already watched Japan run the same experiment a decade earlier. Most of those farms failed. The technology was fascinating; the unit economics were not.

That memory became his strategy. While competitors chased volume on cheap greens, Koga refused to spend, in his words, a single dime on them. He went after the crop that justified the cost of an indoor farm - and then solved the problem that made it impossible.

The bee problem

Leafy greens don't flower. Strawberries do, which means they need pollination - and pollination is where the math usually breaks. "If you don't use bees and you rely on manual pollination, the unit economics will never make sense," Koga explains. Hand-pollinating millions of flowers is a non-starter. So Oishii put real bees to work indoors, supported by AI and machine vision that watch the process. The bar Koga set is brutal: "When I say 'perfect pollination,' it's not just 30% or 60%; it has to be 90% or more." Hitting that number is why Oishii became the only company in vertical farming to produce pollinated fruit at commercial scale.

Homesickness, with a Brix value

The origin is smaller and more human than the technology suggests. Koga grew up in Tokyo, where good fruit was a thing you gave as a gift on special occasions. When he moved to the United States for his MBA at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the first thing he noticed was that the produce tasted flat - an agriculture system optimized for yield and shelf life rather than flavor. He missed the strawberries of his childhood. So he carried Omakase Berry seeds from Japan's alpine regions to New York and rebuilt the climate of the Japanese Alps inside a controlled farm.

"Omakase" means "I leave it to the chef" - the trust you hand a sushi master when you let him decide your meal. Applied to a strawberry, it's a promise about quality you don't get to negotiate. To find his first believers, Koga cold-called chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants until they agreed to taste what he was growing. They did. Fast Company would later call Oishii "the Tesla of strawberries."

From $50 to your grocery aisle

The Omakase Berry launched in New York City in 2018 at around $50 a tray. By 2022 the price had dropped to roughly $20 as the farms scaled - the long arc of a luxury item bending toward something a normal person might buy on a normal Tuesday. Oishii added the Koyo Berry and, at the end of 2023, the Rubi tomato. Tomato trials reportedly hit a sweetness (Brix) value as high as the Omakase Berry, which is the kind of statistic that makes Koga, by his own admission "a little obsessed, maybe too obsessed with food," genuinely excited.

The growth has come against a brutal backdrop. As high-profile vertical-farming startups folded around it, Oishii closed a $134 million Series B led by the Japanese telecom giant NTT in early 2024, bringing total funding past the $180 million mark, and opened a 240,000-square-foot indoor farm in Lopatcong Township, New Jersey. Koga's verdict on the moment competitors were collapsing: Oishii was doing "better than ever."

What he's actually building

Strip away the berries and the bees and Koga's project is an argument: that American agriculture made the wrong trade, picking quantity and shelf life over taste and nutrition, and that you can reverse it with climate control, robotics and patience. Pesticide-free, non-GMO, grown year-round near the cities that eat them. The roadmap runs past strawberries into tomatoes, peppers and melons. For a man who structures his entire day around meals, it's less a business plan than a worldview - one delicious, side-first bite at a time.