The Cheese Labo

We’re leveraging a lifelong interest in quality food and years building factory monitoring solutions to build a contemporary urban cheesemaking business in Greater Tokyo. We plan to create a production facility surrounded by glass that customers can see, adjacent to a retail space highlighting our own and other craft cheese products, and a light meal service highlighting cheese (sandwiches, salads, possibly pizzas depending on total available space).

Our initial cheese product plan is to focus on a soft double-cream cheese with a short aging cycle and a longer-aged cheddar/gruyere hybrid, with variants incorporating Japanese ingredients as a way of creating an "only in Japan" product. The retail side will serve as a tool for customer education and marketing, and we’ll make our products available to a wider audience via an online shop and subscription service.

Starting in October 2024, we’ve been doing a trial rental of a space at Mizonokuchi behind the Marui Family department store in Takatsu-ku, Kawasaki station. Once our financing closes on October 31, 2024, we’ll prepare new signage, and introduce the neighborhood to our local brand, Nokucheese. This is a bakery/café with 8-10 seats, where we’re serving up a rustic potato bread made with 40% kita-akari potatoes, coffee roasted within 6 kilometers of our shop, and sandwiches made from locally- and internationally- sourced cheese, as well as our fresh cheeses.

We’re expecting it to take a few more months to arrange a space and financing for our cheese production facility but this bakery gives us a place to start our cheese production experiments and serves as an initial source of revenue, and ultimately as a sales channel.