“When a leading brand experiences a food safety crisis, it often exposes the vulnerabilities of an entire supply chain.”

Text / Ba Jiuling

As the annual 315 Consumer Rights Day approaches, everyday issues like food safety, counterfeit products, and other concerns are brought together into a single ledger for public review.

This year, a new face has appeared on the ledger—Sushiro.

Celebrity Downfall

Since March, multiple consumers have reported symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting after dining at Sushiro.

Most striking was a report on March 6th by Southern Metropolis Daily, which stated that on March 1st, a customer found parasite eggs in tuna at the Beijing Chang’an Tiandi store. The local market regulation bureau has now officially opened an investigation.

Image source: China News Service

Who is Sushiro?

Over the past year, even if you haven’t eaten at Sushiro, many have seen long lines outside its stores.

Since the rise of popular chains like Heytea and Ge Laoguan, queuing culture has become commonplace in China, but Sushiro has still exceeded expectations.

According to testers, reservations require a month in advance, and on-site, under extreme conditions, customers should be prepared to wait over 14 hours. Daily queues reach around 3,000 tables, making it just as popular during the Spring Festival.

Customers queuing outside Sushiro

There’s also the issue of scalpers. Seventy-one Sushiro stores in China have become stages for street-smart scalpers—they not only recruit retirees to queue on their behalf but also hoard reservation slots by exchanging numbers with consumers. Recently, a shocking new tactic has circulated online: a “hereditary system” for eating at Sushiro, where people pass the slots in relay, turning a single table into a continuous flow of diners.

Some media described it as—while many food brands are desperate to maintain a good image, Sushiro has become a conspicuous exception.

However, even exceptions have exceptions.

After food safety controversies pushed Sushiro into the spotlight, people realized that Sushiro isn’t just full of praise.

Over the past two years, complaints about food safety at Sushiro have been common.

As early as June last year, a Sushiro in Xicheng District, Beijing, was fined 3,000 yuan for worms in its ramen. In October, a Sushiro in Haidian District was fined 1,000 yuan for violating food safety laws.

Among more than 40 Black Cat complaints, many involved diarrhea after eating and unclean containers.

Image source: Black Cat Complaints

These issues were overshadowed by its reputation as the “queue king.” If not for the upcoming 315, they might not have been so easily spotlighted.

Currently, Sushiro’s responses remain at the official statement level. When faced with complaints and media inquiries, responses from customer service emails are quite similar, often ending with a reassurance like:

Sushiro always considers food safety the lifeline of the brand. The procurement, transportation, and storage of ingredients strictly follow national food safety standards. If any abnormalities are found, immediate rectification will be carried out.

Lean Revolution

In a sense, Sushiro’s success is closely tied to its series of innovations in industrialized dining and its responses to food safety issues.

Though Sushiro has only been in China for five years, in Japan it is a well-established company with 51 years of history.

Founded in 1975, it established the “Sushiro” brand in 1984, and after 27 years, it became Japan’s top-selling conveyor belt sushi chain, a record it still holds.

Customers queuing outside Sushiro

Japanese cuisine, especially sushi, is characterized by simple, straightforward preparation with minimal processing. The supply chain mainly revolves around ingredients, making ingredient quality one of the most distinctive features that set sushi and Japanese cuisine apart from other dining sectors.

As a brand born during Japan’s deflation era, Sushiro’s core principles are three words: freshly made, affordable, raw. Its operation is supported by a meticulous efficiency system:

◎ First, replacing manual rolling with machines, Sushiro’s sushi robots can produce 3,600 pieces per hour, minimizing labor and avoiding risks associated with human error.

Making rice balls with machines Image source: HungryGoWhere

◎ Second, IC chips are embedded in sushi plates to manage freshness and sales. To maintain quality, any sushi that has traveled 350 meters on the track is automatically removed.

These two food safety incidents have actually pushed Sushiro to improve further.

Two years after entering China, Sushiro was affected by the Japanese nuclear wastewater incident, prompting a shift toward more localized supply chains. In China, it’s hard to find Japanese seafood; most ingredients are sourced locally, such as sea urchins from Dalian, foie gras from Shandong, red snapper from Fujian, and eel from Shunde.

In 2023, a high school student in Japan was caught on video licking a communal soy sauce bottle and contaminating passing sushi with saliva. The video caused a stir on social media.

Sushiro responded swiftly, announcing the removal of the traditional conveyor belt model and introducing a new “Sushi Shinkansen” system combining ordering with precise delivery. This not only helped it navigate the crisis but also became a brand hallmark.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency

Thanks to this, Sushiro gained popularity in China.

By 2025, thanks to strong performance in the Chinese market, Sushiro’s stock price soared, with a market value surpassing 1 trillion yen, continuing its upward trend. According to plans, by 2035, the number of stores in China will reach 500—seven times the current number.

Image source: Futu NiuNiu

Sushiro’s success has also inspired its compatriots. As Chinese society begins to favor rational consumption, many Japanese restaurant chains with highly refined cost control systems and store models, led by Sushiro and Saria, are expanding into China.

They are ambitious and confident: “In China, Japanese restaurant brands are praised for their good balance of quality and price, and for making consumers feel assured.”

However, now, praise has turned into doubt. On March 6th, the day after the “parasite egg” incident was reported, Sushiro’s parent company Food&Life Companies’ stock price dropped nearly 14%, to 8,452 yen, the largest intraday decline since November 2023.

Sushiro’s expansion ambitions urgently need a proper crisis response.

Contagion Effect

Looking deeper, this isn’t just a challenge for Sushiro alone.

Consumer concern over food safety has long existed, but the current situation is markedly different from the past.

According to the “2025 China Chain Restaurant Development White Paper,” the chainization rate of the restaurant industry has increased to 23%, nearly doubling in less than a decade.

Image source: Xinhua News Agency

In theory, branding and chain operations are safeguards for food safety—they concentrate resources and standardize processes, making risks more controllable.

However, when resources are overly centralized, it can lead to a domino effect.

◎ On one hand, for expanding chains like Sushiro, a problem in one store can cast suspicion on all.

◎ On the other hand, for larger Chinese restaurant chains with more aggressive expansion, hidden risks may be even greater.

Over the past five years, Sushiro’s expansion has been rapid, but in the face of China’s hyper-competitive restaurant chains, it’s modest.

KFC took 43 years to reach 10,000 stores; McDonald’s took 33 years; Starbucks took 35 years. In China, Mixue Bingcheng took 21 years to reach 10,000 stores; Luckin Coffee did it in less than six; Cudy even compressed this cycle to under two years.

Image source: UpMenu

New emerging brands are also rapidly capturing market share. For example, Quafu Skewers, founded in 2018, surpassed 3,000 stores by 2025; Mivun Bibimbap had 1,000 stores in 2023 and nearly 2,000 by 2025.

The “Chinese speed” of fast-paced retail in the restaurant industry is closely linked to a shared “moat.”

◎ First, they share top suppliers.

As the saying goes, “On stage, competitors; off stage, the same hands.” From raw materials to packaging, brands tend to rely on leading suppliers. For example, Sanchang Dairy supplies milk to half of the bubble tea industry; Dexin Food’s juices and syrups are used by KFC, McDonald’s, and Mixue; brands also share packaging companies like Nawang Packaging and Jialian Technology.

◎ Second, they share a mature social logistics network and warehousing system, where a single cold chain warehouse may serve hotpot brands, coffee shops, milk tea outlets, and convenience stores simultaneously.

Cold chain logistics vehicles

Coupled with China’s unique digital marketing system, some scholars refer to this shared “moat” as the digital infrastructure of Chinese retail. It functions like an open-source model—anyone who joins can grow rapidly.

Under this shared model, the platform-oriented evolution of the supply chain is quietly changing the structure of food safety risks.

The most immediate consequence is the failure of brand endorsement.

In the past, a restaurant brand’s growth from a single store to a chain involved a slow process of site selection, flavor adjustment, and brand accumulation. Now, with access to the same “moat,” rapid growth creates a false sense of scale.

Meanwhile, sharing the same water also means sharing a single lightning strike.

When supply chain nodes are highly centralized, a problem at one point can spread through the network. When a leading brand faces a food safety crisis, it often reveals vulnerabilities across the entire supply chain.

Image source: Catering Boss Insider

Conclusion

In the past, people only paid attention to ingredients in the fridge, tables in the dining hall, kitchen floors and stoves, and the hands of operators. Today, while visible safety issues have improved significantly, unseen and unknown risks have increased.

As the restaurant industry becomes a highly industrialized system, risks are hidden inside a black box.

The significance of the 315 signal is to catch the moment when this black box is occasionally opened.

What consumers need is not just apologies and compensation, but honesty—so that they don’t have to wait for the next incident to find out what’s really inside the black box.

References:

1. “Sushiro Wins Effortlessly,” Yuan Chuan Research Institute, 2026.1

2. “Why Does 315 Love ‘Hounding’ the Food Industry?” Catering Boss Insider, 2026.3

3. “Sushiro Operator F&LC Aims for 1 Trillion Yen Revenue,” Nikkei Chinese, 2025.12

4. “Japanese Food Industry Uses Deflation Experience to Promote Low-Cost Stores in China,” Nikkei Chinese, 2025.10

5. “Xiang Shuai: Why Are China’s 10,000-Store Brands Growing So Fast? Is It Sustainable?” 2023.10

Author | He Feng Yue Ban | Editor | Xu Tao

Chief Editor | He Mengfei | Image Source | VCG, Online

Author’s Note: Personal opinions are for reference only.