12 Best Highlights From FoodEx, Asia's Largest Food and Beverage Exhibition

A. Froug

Alongside its samples of grilled beef, Sukarne Global charged FoodEx visitors 200 yen for a picture with the Sukarne cow mascot and female representatives.

Reporting from Tokyo, where just last week FoodEx, the largest food and beverage exhibition in Asia, welcomed more than 73,000 attendees over four days. Samples were flying off the tables, gobbled and chugged ravenously, as suppliers and distributors from around the world wooed potential clients. We saw models and dancing mascots hawking everything from pickled fish eggs to Belgian beer, rose gelee to Krazy Salt. After hours in the throng of hungry exhibitiongoers, tasting and photographing everything halfway edible and drinkable, we've found the 12 Best Highlights From FoodEx:

A. Froug

12. Katsuobushi and Other Dried Fish:
No Japanese food exhibition would be complete without dried and fermented fish. This vendor included a range of fish, from bonito to Spanish mackerel to tuna. The smell is unmistakably smoky, potently fishy and strangely enticing.

A. Froug

11. Yuzu, Yuzu, Yuzu:
In Los Angeles bars and vaguely fusion-y restaurants across the country, an air of preciousness surrounds yuzu, a citrus fruit native to Japan. In its homeland, there's no such thing. Whether as yuzu vinegar, yuzu sorbet, yuzu juice or yuzu gelee, it's refreshing, unpretentious and fantastic.

A. Froug

10. Passion Fruit Wine:
Tida Sparkling is the first passion fruit wine we've come across, passion fruit allowed to ferment to become a lightly alcoholic beverage. It tasted singularly of passion fruit and came in small brightly colored glass bottles, sold by Hawaiian-shirt-clad representatives.