Fujiwara Techno-art's 'Small-scale Aerated Solid Culture Equipment' Wins Grand Prize at FOOMA Award 2026

Fujiwara Techno-art Co., Ltd. (Location: Okayama City, Okayama Pref., CEO: Keiko Fujiwara) announced that its 'Small-scale Aerated Solid Culture Equipment' has won the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Manufacturing Industries Bureau Director-General's Award / Grand Prize at the 5th FOOMA Award 2026. The company is a brewing and food machinery manufacturer holding approximately 80% of the domestic market share for automated koji production capacity.

The FOOMA Award is one of the industry's most prestigious awards, recognizing products and technologies in food machinery for their innovation, practicality, and social contribution.

Product Features The 'Small-scale Aerated Solid Culture Equipment' is a compact device that utilizes solid-state culture technology, widely known in Japan as 'koji-making,' to add high value to underutilized resources. It employs the same substrate aeration temperature control method and stirring mechanism as large-scale equipment, enabling highly reproducible, automated culture tests and 24-hour unmanned operation even on a small scale.

This provides four key benefits: - Easy adoption of solid-state culture technology for research institutes and SMEs. - A rapid process for verifying the value of unused resources and moving toward commercialization. - Contribution to achieving a circular economy. - A pathway to building a sustainable society based on a microbial industry platform.

The device has also been installed at the research facility of 'Ferments du Futur (FdF),' a fermentation research consortium led by France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the French National Association of Food Industries (ANIA).

In Japan, initiatives to utilize unused resources are also beginning, such as 'polyphenol-rich bread' made by fermenting post-extraction coffee grounds with koji mold.

Mr. Yoichi Goto, the chairman of the FOOMA Award judging committee, commented, 'This is an inspiring machine that will spread Japan's proud brewing and fermentation technology to the world.'

Fujiwara Techno-art plans to apply its cultivated fermentation and solid-state culture technology beyond the brewing and food sectors to new fields such as food tech, biorefineries, and functional materials, thereby contributing to the realization of a circular society.