Oishii Doubles Down on Plant Biology With Tokyo Open Innovation Center

Robots are easy to buy. Decade-long strawberry intuition is not. On September 16, 2026, AgNavigator published an interview with Oishii Chief of Strategy John Reed arguing that vertical farming’s next bottleneck is longitudinal plant biology—not another climate-control SKU.

The knowledge gap Reed names

“The vertical farming sector is still developing the deep, long-term horticultural expertise needed to fully understand how crops behave across their entire lifecycle in controlled environments,” Reed said. Strawberries, Oishii’s specialty, are an especially hard teacher: multi-year lifecycles with nutritional, environmental, and developmental needs that “vary dramatically” by stage.

Hardware—robots, sensors, HVAC—can be purchased and copied. Crop-specific know-how accumulates only through years of experiments. Reed’s pitch: indoor farms can run multiple experimental cycles every month, year-round, compressing learning that outdoor seasons stretch across years.

Open Innovation Center, Hamura

Oishii’s new Open Innovation Center opened August 5, 2026 in Hamura, western Tokyo. AgNavigator frames it as an accelerator for experiments on scalable systems, productivity, sustainability, flavour/quality, and new fruit/vegetable varieties. The company says it already runs hundreds of experiments yearly and expects the hub to raise that tempo.

Near-term research priority: how precise environmental controls further improve flavour and sensory traits. Longer-term: breeding varieties optimized for Oishii’s system—“higher yield, better quality, greater consistency, and fruit that is easier for robots to harvest,” Reed said—rather than forever adapting commodity cultivars to indoor racks.

Capital context

The center follows the first close of Oishii’s $150 million Series C in May 2026, with continued U.S. and Japan expansion. Related coverage of the Hamura opening also highlights partner work with investor NTT on optical pest/disease approaches and voltage-controlled refrigeration for strawberry freshness—useful adjacent color, separate from the AgNavigator strategy interview.

Rocks take

This is a strategy story with a real facility date—not a robot harvest demo reel. If you’re tracking indoor ag beyond LED wattage, Reed’s framing is the honest one: biology is the hard mode. Source: AgNavigator.

FAQ

Where is the center? Hamura, Tokyo; opened August 5, 2026.

What crop? Oishii is best known for premium indoor strawberries; the hub also targets broader produce R&D.