In an Era When Kyokuyo Makes Sushi Toppings in Thailand, Vietnam's Factories Are Chosen for Their Processes

On the purchase orders reaching Vietnamese processing plants from Japan, the biggest change over the past few years has been not the quantity column but the shape column. From notations like 'so many tonnes of headless, block-frozen,' specifications have come to include the weight and length per piece, how the tail is left on, and how far the back is stretched after butterflying. The summary of global seafood news that the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) issued on October 2, 2026 includes a note that four major Japanese companies are increasing deeply processed items — peeled shrimp, butterfly-cut, sushi-grade, tempura-grade, breaded, and pre-prepped — aiming to cut the work of foodservice and retail. This note, however, is a Vietnamese-language summary of reporting by a Japanese seafood trade paper, and the original article itself could not be identified.

VASEP's October 2 piece reported deeper processing at Nissui, Kyokuyo, Nichirei, and Umios

The four companies appearing in VASEP's summary are Nissui, Kyokuyo, Nichirei, and Umios. The summary frames it as the four raising the share of deeply processed items to cut the work of foodservice and retail, listing concrete product forms: peeled shrimp, butterfly-cut, sushi-grade, tempura-grade, breaded, and pre-prepped. For Nissui there is a further note that it makes a product of pre-cooked whiteleg shrimp butterfly-cut in Vietnam and Indonesia, offered in a ready-to-use-after-thawing form in six sizes.

VASEP's summary gives the reasons in two layers. The product-side reason is to reduce the knife work in foodservice kitchens and retail back rooms. The other layer is the move to shift the processing steps themselves to producing countries because of Japan's domestic labor shortage. The steps of peeling, butterflying, and stretching remain in human hands, not fully mechanizable, and if labor cannot be gathered at home, the steps are sent out as a whole to where the labor is. It is this second layer in which the Vietnamese side reads its own offering as labor and process.

The relevant item in VASEP's piece carries no attribution. The same article names a media outlet for a different item (Japan's August seafood exports of 39,357 tonnes, ¥31.67 billion), which is sourced to Minato Shimbun. For the four companies' deeper processing, VASEP's description is the only clue; it is not that each company announced as much.

The parts that could be corroborated from each company's official information are examined company by company below.

Look at frozen-shrimp volume alone, and the more deep processing grows, the more the market appears to shrink

When reading shrimp import statistics, the first thing to grasp is how the HS codes split. Head-on frozen shrimp, headless frozen shrimp, and prepared products such as breaded or seasoned go into separate numbers. Items that have advanced through processing, like butterfly-cut or sushi-grade, move over to the prepared side, so following frozen-shrimp volume alone makes the market look as if it shrinks the more deep processing grows. The result also changes depending on whether the period is taken by calendar year or fiscal year.

This is not an overly fussy convention; in shrimp statistics it actually fails to line up. Shrimp is split by HS code into head-on and headless, shell-on and peeled, cooked and raw. The level of a figure labeled 'frozen shrimp' changes depending on which codes it sums. Highly processed breaded shrimp goes to the prepared side, so the more deep processing grows, the more the market looks to have shrunk if you watch only the 'frozen shrimp' volume. The period, too — whether it is a cumulative January-through-July of the calendar year or seven months of the fiscal year — can flip the sign of the year-on-year change.

Paste a figure from secondary information straight into an internal purchasing proposal, and later someone points out the difference in aggregation scope and the whole document becomes unusable. If you are going to argue about volume, it is faster in the end to bring a figure that makes explicit the HS codes and the period you pulled yourself. Even when showing a plant a volume to negotiate price, whether you can state where your basis came from changes how the talk proceeds.

Kyokuyo itself describes its Thai subsidiary's business as 'manufacture of sushi toppings, simmered and grilled fish, etc.'

Of the four companies, the one that describes its overseas processing most concretely on its official site is Kyokuyo. Its list of group companies records the business of KYOKUYO GLOBAL SEAFOODS Co., Ltd. in Samut Sakhon Province, Thailand, as 'manufacture of sushi toppings, simmered and grilled fish, etc.' In Vietnam there is Kyokuyo Vina Foods Co., Ltd. in Ho Chi Minh City, whose business is given as 'manufacture of food products, etc.'

The single line 'manufacture of sushi toppings' is easy to skim past, but its substance is weighty. Sushi toppings are the final form that goes straight onto the shelves of Japan's conveyor-belt and takeout sushi, and the company writes in its own corporate profile that it makes them at its own local plant. What it is sending outside the country is not raw material but the very process of taking raw material through to its final form.

Nissui's list of overseas group companies includes NIGICO Co., Ltd in Vietnam. It is located in the Gia Rai area of Ca Mau Province along National Highway 1A, and its business is recorded as 'sale of seafood and food products.' Ca Mau is the center of Vietnamese shrimp, so the location fits. The official entry, however, says 'sale,' and nothing is written about processing.

VASEP's summary says Nissui produces sushi-grade shrimp products in Vietnam and Indonesia. Of these, the Indonesian side could not be confirmed. Nissui's list of overseas group companies shows companies in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Oceania, with the Asia-Oceania breakdown being Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia. No company located in Indonesia appears.

This does not mean it does not produce there. Contract processing needs no own legal entity, and there are forms of investment that do not appear on such a list. Whether or not it produces there is not settled by this list.

This is also a verification procedure usable as is in sourcing practice. Read what the counterpart officially states, going right down to the business column of the group-company list. Send the same spec sheet to a company that says 'manufacture' and one that says 'sale,' and with one of them the talk will not move forward. The same goes for name changes: the URL of Maruha Nichiro's news page, as of early October 2026, redirects to umios.com. The name change has been carried out, and the work of fixing the addressee on contracts and sanitary certificates and the notation in the supplier master remains on the ground.

Turning butterfly-cut shrimp into a sushi topping by thawing alone requires length sorting and X-ray inspection

The single line 'ready to use after thawing' is, from the plant's side, a bundle of requirements. Freezing peeled shrimp graded by weight and butterflying and stretching them into a form that sits on sushi rice differ clearly in the equipment needed and the records that must be kept.

Butterflying is the step of splitting open the back of a peeled shrimp — shell and vein already removed — then cutting the sinew on the belly side to flatten and stretch it. Peeled shrimp will sell if the weight per piece is even, but once split and stretched, its appearance on sushi rice is determined by length and width. Even at the same weight, a short, thick individual and a long, thin one become different things. Size sorting by weight alone is not enough; a separate length-sorting step is required. This is hard to replace with machines, and the share done by human eyes and hands is high. The reason the Japanese side sends deep processing outside lies precisely in the labor of this step.

Because the splitting step trims off flesh, the yield falls below that of peeled shrimp. The drop in yield is recouped through the unit price of a length-even product. The winning line as seen by Vietnamese processors has moved not to farming cost nor to yield but to whether they can take on the process through to the final form— and the reason is this relationship between yield and unit price.

Foreign-matter control changes form too. Flesh that has been split and thinned makes it easier to raise the sensitivity of a metal detector, but shell fragments, shrimp legs, and pond sand are not metal and will not trip the detector. It comes down to either installing an X-ray inspection machine or increasing the number of people doing visual sorting. Whether to make it a 100% inspection or a sampling one changes the daily throughput and how staffing is arranged.

On the premise of use by thawing alone, there is no step to lower bacterial counts after the plant has cooked the product. Because control downstream of the final step does not apply, buyers come to check whether the line's temperature range, the time each piece is exposed to room temperature, the frequency of equipment washing, and the frequency of glove changes are kept as records. As for Japan's own standards, jurisdiction over food sanitation standards was transferred from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare to the Consumer Affairs Agency on April 1, 2024. Because the reference point when citing the provisions has changed, circulating old internal materials unchanged will leave the source out of step. Surveillance and guidance at the time of import continue to operate under the framework of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's imported-food monitoring and guidance plan.

In terms of the equipment lineup, what the peeled-shrimp step additionally needs is a sorting table that measures length, trays and a conveyor to arrange the split flesh, and a tunnel freezer for IQF. A plant that has only a plate freezer for block freezing cannot make a product that comes apart piece by piece. A tank for glazing and a re-weighing after freezing must also be placed as independent steps to keep the glaze ratio within the value on the purchase order. None of these is expensive equipment on its own, but because it is a matter of re-linking the front and back of the line, the existing headless-freezing line cannot simply be used as is.

The form of packaging also decides whether 'just thaw' succeeds. With IQF, frozen piece by piece, you can take out only the number of pieces needed and thaw them. Frozen in a block, you have to thaw the whole lot, which does not fit a store's operation. The items that go into the shape column of a purchase order keep multiplying: the weight ratio of the glaze, the net-weight labeling, whether the tail is left on or removed, black discoloration of the tail, and the tolerance range for bending and cracking.

The items landing in the spec sheet increase too. Upper and lower weight limits per piece, length and width after stretching, tail treatment, limit samples for discoloration and bending, the glaze ratio, settings for metal detection and X-ray, lot size, and the unit of traceability. A plant that can match the same goods to a spec sheet written out to this degree every time does not easily lose the business even when raw-material prices move up or down. A plant competing on price lists alone sees its counterpart swapped out each time the market moves.

Set alongside 15 ASC feed-certified plants and squid and octopus sushi toppings, the room left to grow is on the process side

The upstream build-out is advancing in Vietnam. Feed plants holding ASC feed certification have reached 15 in Vietnam, the most in the world— a sign that the conditions for buying as raw material are coming together. Certification, however, is a matter of the conditions for buying, a different axis from whether the final form can be made. Even with certification in place, if there is no step to even up length and to split and stretch, orders for sushi toppings will not come.

The price side is even clearer. Ecuadorian shrimp's pond-harvest price, and Vietnamese operators choosing to compete on processing and large sizes— we covered this before, but if there is a rival you cannot beat on pond-harvest raw-material price, the only move is to step into a layer where price works differently. Sell the process, and the benchmark for price becomes not the per-kilo price of raw material but the labor cost the buyer would incur doing it at its own plant. You can step off the contest of competing on cheapness on the same ground.

This idea is already in motion next door to shrimp. A Vietnamese food company trying to sell sushi-topping squid and octopus to Japan and South Korea is looking for buyers on the premise of doing the cutting, slicing, boiling, and shaping at the plant. Butterflying shrimp is the step right beside that, with a large overlap in freezing equipment and sorting labor. A plant that has made it with squid and octopus will get a hearing for shrimp sushi toppings too.

When a Japanese sourcing officer goes to see a plant, simply changing the order of questions changes what becomes visible. Rather than starting from pond area and feed brand, ask: how many workers run the splitting-and-stretching step and for how many hours a day, who does the length sorting and at which step, is the X-ray 100% or sampling, and how much throughput does the IQF tunnel have. Ask in this order and, in a half-day visit, it becomes clear whether the counterpart is a company that wants to sell raw material or one that wants to sell process. That Kyokuyo describes its own Thai subsidiary's business as 'manufacture of sushi toppings, simmered and grilled fish, etc.' is the single line most easily missed by those who still think the shrimp business is a matter of raw material.

Sources

• VASEP — Điểm tin thủy sản thế giới (world seafood news briefing), 02/10/2026
• Kyokuyo — group companies
• Nissui — overseas group companies
• Umios — News & Topics
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — food standards and specifications (on the transfer of food sanitation standards administration to the Consumer Affairs Agency)
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — ensuring the safety of imported food