We visited a place where you can experience making food samples.

We have some comments from them;

“I very much enjoyed our field trip to the Riki fake food factory! It was a treat to get a behind the scenes look at such a unique aspect of Japanese culture.

We had the chance to look around, take pictures, and hear a bit of the background of the process, and then it was time to make our own fake food creations! This was a lot of fun, and a really great keepsake to take back to the US with us.

After that, we got to see a demonstration of the old style of creating fake food: with wax. This was extremely impressive and it felt like we were watching a personal magic show. We then got to take a lot of fun selfies with props that our hosts had prepared, which really let their creativity shine.

Overall a very amusing and fun outing, and I’d very much recommend it to others!”

“Ever wonder why the food in show windows of restaurants in Japan never gets old, stale, or moldy?  We found out on our field trip to the RIKI Sample Food factory.  Actually I had a suspicion because of a traumatic experience of my young childhood with what I thought was a chocolate:  sometimes food is made of plastic.

The current head-honcho of the company is keeping up the tradition of his father, Riki Hashimoto, the founder, who started with this special skill 70 years ago.  We got to see the surprising techniques the artisans use to create plastic masterpieces that are amazingly similar to the real thing.  They use a variety of tools and materials (mostly types of plastics) to form pastries, pastas, pizzas, parfaits, steaks, fish, ramen, eggs, salad, fruit, tempura, and most anything else you would expect to order at a restaurant around here.  Melting, molding, painting, sprinkling, extruding, and decorating produce the results.

After watching the demonstrations we got a chance to make sample food ourselves.  I did a parfait in a tall glass cup with cornflakes, pokki stick and fruit toppings.  The others made creamy fruit tarts suitable for birthday greeting or smart-phone holders.  With very close supervision from the staff, our products looked good enough to eat.  It was a very fun day with major selfie-op occasions.”