Like many vacationers visiting Japan, I fell in love with onigiri, plump triangles of rice wrapped in skinny sheets of roasted seaweed referred to as nori. They have been ubiquitous and low cost, much less critical than sushi however nonetheless a delight to eye and palate, the right answer for that sudden starvation pang. So after I learn that the snacks have been out there at branches of Marks & Spencer Group and Waitrose in London, I needed to examine them out.
Historically, onigiri are do-it-yourself and hand-finished; the rice will get wrapped in nori simply earlier than you chunk into it, in any other case the crisp, umami-packed inexperienced sheet will get soggy. Underneath Toshifumi Suzuki — the entrepreneur who introduced the 7-Eleven chain to Japan within the Seventies — packaging for store-bought onigiri advanced with a plastic movie separating the nori from the rice. They then mix after pulling on three numbered tabs. It’s really easy and so intelligent that you just wish to purchase one other simply to benefit from the engineering once more. Japan’s comfort shops promote about 6 billion onigiri every year.
So how do the British incarnations price? At M&S, which launched its Kando model within the spring of 2025, the snack is encased in a plastic case that provides off toolkit vibes. The nori is decreased to a strip, perhaps to accommodate British reticence towards seaweed; the phrase “onigiri” was solely licensed in English in 2024 by turning into an Oxford English Dictionary entry. Maybe to cultivate it additional, the sides of the M&S onigiri are sprinkled with a mix of sesame seeds and bits of one other sort of seaweed that give the product the look of a triangular sandwich.
