Tacos, Endives, Scones and Bird Nests: 80 Countries Showcase Delicacies at Foodex Trade Show in Tokyo

By Tom Baker / Japan News Staff Writer

12:10 JST, April 8, 2026

National adjectives pair well with certain foods. Think of Belgian endives, English scones, Irish beef, Italian panettone, Madagascar vanilla and, um, Swedish tacos.

“Tex-Mex is very close to Swedish people’s hearts. Every Friday, we eat tacos,” said Jonna Wibelius, who introduced Santa Maria brand taco-making supplies at the March 10-13 Foodex trade show at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center in Koto Ward, Tokyo. “In Sweden, Friday is kind of like a cozy night with your family. It’s the end of the week, and you pick up your kids from school or day care and you want to have a really nice family [dinner]. And what’s better than tacos? … The kids can eat their vegetables, and everyone enjoys it.”

According to data released by Foodex, Sweden was one of 80 countries represented at the show, and Santa Maria was one of more than 3,000 food and drink brands displaying products that are now on the Japanese market, or may be soon.

Wibelius, commercial director of Paulig, Santa Maria’s parent company, said they put a “Nordic spin” on the North American cuisine with innovations such as the “taco tub,” a taco shell shaped like a narrow rectangular bowl to make the meal tidier — though she cheerfully conceded that tacos “should be a little bit messy.”

Less surprising than the Swedish penchant for tacos is the English love of scones. Luke Padgett, a director of the Yorkshire bakery Haywood & Padgett, said his company makes a million scones every day and mentioned a surge in demand around the coronation of King Charles III. His company’s daily parade of scones rides a conveyor belt through a “traveling oven” in which they are exposed to direct heat from above and below, which Padgett said “gives it a beautiful rise,” referring to the soft white middle between the lightly browned top and bottom.

Some countries stand out for certain foods due to their natural conditions. Bord Bia (Irish Food Board) official Joe Moore was at the Foodex to promote his country’s beef, which he said in Japan is sold mostly to the food service industry for use in restaurant dishes and supermarket deli items.

“The quality is incredible,” he said. “In Ireland, we get a lot of rain, a lot wind, but what we do have is great grass. Simply put, if you have good grass, you have happy cows, and happy cows bring a very high quality beef.”

Natural conditions in another island nation favor the growth of vanilla beans. Ramunas Scebeda, head of export operations of Vanileco, said 80% of the world’s vanilla comes from Madagascar, where his company has over 100 hectares under cultivation. Most vanilla comes from smaller farms, he said, so Vanileco’s size gives it economy of scale. All that land is covered by two kinds of plants. One is the vanilla vines themselves, which can grow to 15-20 meters long but are kept trimmed to 3-5 meters, while the other is trees that give the vines support and shade, he explained. The harvested green vanilla beans must be boiled, fermented and sun-cured for four months to become the fragrant black final product. The air around Vanileco’s Foodex booth smelled delightful.

Natural vanilla, along with yeast, egg yolk and butter, is among the key ingredients for Italian panettone bread — at least its artisanal Milanese variety — according to information provided by Kaori Ereditato of Associazione Panettone Giappone. Ereditato explained that panettone, commonly served around Christmas, contains bits of fruit symbolizing good fortune: raisins for wealth, orange for love and citron for health. Another fun fact is that freshly baked loaves are hung upside down overnight to preserve their distinctive domed shape.

In Malaysia, tiny birds called swiftlets are the makers of a specialty food that hangs on a wall. Wendy Yong, a manager at a company called MBN, explained that the birds use their own saliva — which hardens into a pale, translucent material — to build their nests on vertical surfaces. In nature, that might mean cliffsides, but a video at the MBN booth showed a large, empty concrete building that had been set up as an inviting place for swiftlets to build nests high on the walls. Small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, the semicircular nests have dark streaks of feathers and other impurities that must be painstakingly removed by hand for a clean final product.

The nests themselves have no flavor and become jellylike when cooked, Yong said. For people seeking the benefits that the nests are reputed to bestow in traditional Chinese medicine, MBN sells the jelly in products such as a drink sweetened with rock sugar or a pudding flavored with mango.

Perhaps no vegetable is associated with a national adjective as closely as the Belgian endive. Although endives superficially resemble compact heads of lettuce, they come from an entirely different plant — chicory.

Didier Lepoutre, an official of Belgian agricultural cooperative BelOrta, recounted the vegetable’s traditional origin story. A farmer in 1830 was growing chicory root, used to strengthen the flavor of coffee, when he went off to fight for Belgian independence, leaving “some roots in his cellar covered by a blanket.” Upon returning home, he noticed the stored roots had sprouted bundles of white leaves in the darkness. And they tasted good.

White endives have a pleasant, mild bitterness. Lepoutre explained that exposure to light turns the leaves green and even more bitter. He said young people have been drifting away from this traditional vegetable, so “we started doing experiments with new varieties, sweeter varieties.”

His BelOrta colleague Thomas Simillion said high-end restaurants were the main endive buyers in Japan because most Japanese people don’t know how to cook them. Lepoutre suggested braising small endives, rolling them in ham, and baking them under a covering of cheese sauce.

A few days later, I tested this simple, delicious recipe at home. I suggest serving the dish with wine, to raise a grateful toast to that 19th-century Belgian farmer.