Nekko Kitchen is a small online shop in Sweden for Japanese tea and everyday ingredients. When we decided to bring in Japanese seaweed, we did not know exactly what we were looking for, but we knew how it should feel. We wanted a producer who looks at their ingredient roughly the way we try to look at our shop: as a craft where the care cannot be skipped.
Fairly early in the search we came across Sea Vegetable, a small Japanese company that in 2016 became the first in the world to cultivate aonori on land, in clean underground seawater. It began as an answer to something sad: the wild harvest of suji-aonori along Japan's coasts has been shrinking as the seas change. Instead of chasing what is disappearing, they built something new, slowly and carefully, without compromising the ingredient itself.
What made us stay was not the technology. It was the tone. Already in the first conversations there was a calm and a warmth that is hard to describe but easy to recognize. No big words, no promises that everything is the best. Just a quiet, patient interest in their own ingredient, and in making sure we truly understood it before selling it on. Our gut feeling said that people who talk like this also work like this.
The moment the bag was opened
Then the first sample arrived. We opened the bag at the kitchen counter, mostly to have a look, and never made it to the spoon before the scent was everywhere. Fresh sea. Green. Almost sweet. None of the dusty, closed-in character we had learned to expect from dried seaweed. It smelled like a shoreline early in the morning, but milder, cleaner.
Suji-aonori, dried and ground. The scent is the first thing you meet.
The first taste confirmed what the scent had already said. It was green and delicate, with a salinity that never took over and a sweetness we did not know seaweed could have. We stood quietly in the kitchen for a moment. That was when we knew this was the collaboration we had been looking for. Not because the sample was impressive, but because it was consistent.
It tasted the way the conversations had sounded.
The same care in the answers as in the cultivation
Before we dared to sell to Swedish customers, we wanted to be able to stand behind every part of the product. We asked many questions about purity and analysis data, more than was perhaps polite. The answers always came with the same patience and openness, never dismissive, never rushed. It confirmed what we had sensed from the start: the care in the dialogue and the care in the cultivation are the same care. The character of the people and the character of the powder cannot be separated.
When the first box of suji-aonori finally stood on the counter, after the journey from Japan via the customs office in Stockholm, it was a quiet moment rather than a grand one. One box, one small shop, an ingredient few in Sweden know about yet. But it felt like a small chapter in something bigger: slowly introducing Japanese sea vegetables to Nordic kitchens, one customer at a time.
Creamy soup with suji-aonori. Where the dill usually goes.
Today, suji-aonori from Sea Vegetable is in the shop, and we have started exploring what it does in Nordic everyday cooking, for example in dishes where dill usually goes, something we have written more about in Aonori Instead of Dill. We are still at the beginning of that journey, and it should show.
But one thing we already dare to say. You can taste how something is made, and by whom. That is what Sea Vegetable taught us, the first time we opened the bag.
From our range
Discover our handpicked selection of Japanese tea and ingredients.
Basim Ali Yoshiguchi is the co-founder of Nekko Kitchen. After many trips to Japan and a long-standing interest in Japanese food and culture, he has immersed himself in Japanese tea, from cultivation and processing to brewing in his own kitchen. Every product in the range is tested by the team before it is added.
