Photo/Illutration The four types of curry from the Suzuki Shokudo brand. The package patterns were created by employees in charge of interior car design. (Hideki Aota)

HAMAMATSU, Shizuoka Prefecture--A vegetarian curry developed for Indian employees of Suzuki Motor Corp. will soon hit store shelves as part of a company push to be associated with multiculturalism.

The auto giant, based here, pitched its packaged curry dishes on June 25.

They are served at Suzuki’s cafeteria in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, where the company has a large Indian workforce.

Suzuki is promoting the curry to underscore city and prefectural efforts to lure highly skilled professionals from India to Hamamatsu.

The ready-made dishes were jointly developed with Torizen, a Hamamatsu-based firm with ties to a long-established Japanese restaurant. Torizen is also involved in catering, bento sales and eatery management.

Aptly named Suzuki Shokudo (Cafeteria Suzuki), the curry brand comes in four varieties.

The daikon sambar mix is relatively light, and the tomato lentil curry features a mix of beans. There is also a brown chickpea masala and moong dal featuring green veggies.

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With a vast landmass, India boasts an extremely diverse culinary culture. 

Yoshitaka Date, the president of Torizen, sought to develop aromatic bean and pea dishes to create a “taste of the homeland” that he hoped would resonate broadly with consumers.

Millions of Indians are vegetarians, so Torizen refrained from using animal-derived ingredients or dairy products for Suzuki Shokudo.

Mishra Ashutosh, 30, a Suzuki engineer from India who arrived in Japan a year earlier, said after sampling the finished product: “It made me feel as if I was back home.”

Having made deep inroads in India, Suzuki is particularly mindful of how it treats its foreign workforce.

Good food, along with language and housing support, has proved key to keeping its workers happy. Vegetarians, especially, often struggle to find food they are familiar with.

For this reason, Suzuki commissioned Torizen to develop specialized curry. The aim was to create an environment “where everybody can reach their full potential.”

The curry’s “authentic Indian flavor” was achieved by creating and testing the recipe over and over.

The dishes, first served at the automaker’s worker cafeteria in January 2024, were a big hit, even among the Japanese staff members.

That led the two firms to collaborate once more to sell the packaged curry on a commercial basis.

The company’s rationale was that pitching Indian food from Hamamatsu to the rest of Japan would help raise the city’s profile and bring benefits to the community.

With more than 30,000 non-Japanese living across the municipality, Hamamatsu is home to a cluster of auto-related corporations and other businesses.

As of April 1, the Indian population in Hamamatsu stood at 675, a 3.5-fold increase from three years ago but still tiny compared to the 9,505 resident Brazilians and 4,958 Vietnamese.

Both Hamamatsu city and Shizuoka Prefecture have been capitalizing on Suzuki’s connections to develop deeper ties with colleges, state governments and companies in India.

Hamamatsu city is behind a lifestyle push to get an international school to relocate to the prefectural capital. Officials say they expect the resident Indian population is to grow further.

Toshihiro Suzuki, the president of the company of the same name, reckons curry is the way to go in pushing cultural diversity.

“Just like people in India, Japanese people love curry,” Suzuki said. “We believe good food, in this case curry, will help foster mutual understanding.”

The curry from Suzuki Shokudo is priced at 918 yen ($6.30), including tax. The packages were created by employees in charge of interior car design.

Starting with the company’s dedicated online shopping site, Suzuki will sell the curry at Suzuki Plaza, a museum adjacent to the automaker’s main office, and elsewhere.

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