What kind of future will Woven City's "invention by multiplication" reveal? Here is part two of our interviews with five Inventor companies.
During CES 2025, Toyota announced five “Inventor” companies that will test new technologies and initiatives in Woven City.
In the first part of this article, we introduced the efforts of Daikin, a renowned air conditioning manufacturer , and DyDo DRINCO, whose business revolves around vending machines.
Part two features Nissin Food Products, UCC Japan, and Zoshinkai Holdings. What do you get when you multiply food, coffee, and education by Toyota and Woven City?
We posed this question to the people involved.
Nissin Food Products: Testing the effectiveness of Optimized Nutri-Dense Meals
Nissin Food Products produces and sells instant noodles and other food products. The company’s mission is to swiftly solve global problems by creating new food cultures. In Woven City, Nissin Food Products will test the effectiveness of its Optimized Nutri-Dense Meals by monitoring how regular consumption affects people’s mental/physical state and behavior.
Optimized Nutri-Dense Meals are food tailored to achieve a good balance of key nutrients based on factors such as an individual’s age, gender, and lifestyle. Nissin Food Products’ research and development in this area led to the launch of its KANZEN MESHI brand in 2022 (around the same time the company announced it would conduct trials in Woven City).
With KANZEN MESHI, Nissin Food Products has gone beyond simply retailing packaged foods, expanding its touchpoints to include company cafeteria menus and office food stands where employees can purchase products at any time.
In Woven City, the company is planning to operate a facility with a kitchen and dining space, serving dishes that follow the Optimized Nutri-Dense Meal standards, along with related services.
Through these trials, Nissin Food Products will explore ways of offering experiences and services that allow customers to enjoy all the benefits of Optimized Nutri-Dense Meals. By segmenting and streamlining the operating processes, the company also seeks to gain expertise that can be applied to its business.
“It’s also important that we test what processes lead to happier customers, and what technologies enable us to combine customer satisfaction with a viable business,” says Rintaro Tsutsui, managing the trial project at Nissin Food Products.
To serve food and receive customer feedback, Tsutsui wants to draw on the mobility solutions for moving people, goods, information, and energy, which Toyota has cultivated through its carmaking.
At the same time, he hopes unfettered discussions between Inventors and Weavers (residents and visitors) will lead to new innovations for the future.
Tsutsui
In terms of age alone, the city will bring together people from a wide range of age groups in a single location, allowing us to engage with a community with diverse ideas about things and approaches to life.
We want to see all manner of back-and-forth dialogue, rather than one-way exchanges between manufacturers and Inventors and Weavers. We hope to find an environment that spurs unexpected discoveries in everyday conversation.
Tsutsui first learned of Woven City in 2022, before coming to Nissin Food Products. Initially, “I imagined them building a base on the moon,” he says. More so even than smart cities, he felt that building something from the ground up offered possibilities for “trying many different things.”
Soon after arriving at his new job, Tsutsui received his hoped-for assignment overseeing the trials. Visiting the Woven City site during construction further fueled his imagination, as he envisioned flying taxis whizzing overhead and e-Palettes shuttling along the roads.
Although the recently completed Phase 1 area is ultimately expected to house some 360 people, Tsutsui is already looking ahead to Phase 2 and beyond, when the city will welcome even more residents.
Tsutsui
Being able to eat what you like, when you like, and as much as you like contributes to human well-being and makes our lives richer.
One concrete approach to achieving this led us to the concept of Optimized Nutri-Dense Meals, which are created to achieve a good balance of key nutrients.
I hope that, through food, we can have a positive impact on individuals and communities. As the city grows in size beyond Phase 1, we envision it bringing in people with ever more diverse values.
As this continues to trigger chemical reactions, we will need to rapidly and flexibly adapt the content of our trials to the city’s scale and circumstances. I think one of the great drawcards of Woven City is that it allows us to conduct high-speed experiments on a city-sized test course. No doubt the city will only get infinitely more exciting as it grows.
In that sense, I would like to ask Woven by Toyota (WbyT) to bring many different people into the city.
While bringing together people with diverse values naturally creates many challenges, I believe that such conditions breed innovation. Indeed, I think the synergies outweigh the challenges, and I am excited to see what emerges.
Tsutsui looks forward to encountering and engaging with Woven City’s various Inventors and residents. When we asked what kind of people he would like to meet, he responded with a smile:
Tsutsui
In theory, as a company, we should start by exploring dialogues and collaborations in areas that seem likely to yield synergies, but to me, that would not be very interesting.
I don’t think it fits with the spirit of Woven City. Rather, we should be talking with people who have nothing to do with Nissin Food Products—rocket builders, for instance, who might suggest something we could use in our food-making process. That’s what a new venture should be about.