Premium strawberry supplier for restaurants & hotels in India

If you run a kitchen, you already know the problem with strawberries. The box that looked good at the mandi is soft by service. The Brix swings week to week. One crate plates beautifully; the next is pale at the shoulders and bleeds onto the plate. And for four months of the year — roughly mid-February to October — good berries are simply hard to find at all.

None of that is bad luck. It’s the supply chain doing exactly what it was built to do. Most strawberries in India move through a system optimised for volume and distance, not for the plate. ICHIGO is built the other way around.

What a foodservice buyer actually needs

Retail shoppers buy on looks. A professional kitchen buys on four things that rarely show up on a price tag:

• Consistent sweetness. A dessert recipe is calibrated to a sugar–acid balance. If Brix drifts from 8° to 11° and back, your pastry section is re-balancing sugar every week.
• Structural firmness. Berries have to survive prep, plating and a few minutes under lights without weeping. A firm calyx and dense flesh are what let you halve a berry cleanly.
• A cold chain that holds. Most spoilage isn’t grown in — it’s added in transit. Every hour a warm berry respires, it loses shelf life you paid for.
• Predictable volume. You can’t put a dish on the menu if the ingredient disappears for a fortnight.

A long mandi chain can give you cheap. It rarely gives you all four at once.

Where ICHIGO is different

ICHIGO doesn’t airfreight luxury berries from Japan. It plants Japanese cultivars in Indian soil — Miyoshi & Co’s Berry Pop F1 varieties, SAKURA (bred for sweetness and aroma) and HARUHI (bred for a stable sugar–acid balance and year-round consistency) — grown under Japanese agricultural supervision in Maharashtra’s Mahabaleshwar–Panchgani belt and in Gujarat, with protected, soil-free cultivation in our polyhouses.

That choice fixes the four problems at the source:

1. Cultivar, not luck. SAKURA and HARUHI were selected for dessert performance — perfume, even ripening, a calyx that stays green and upright. India’s workhorse varieties (Winter Dawn, Camarosa, Nabila, Sweet Charlie) were bred mostly for yield and transport. They’re fine berries; they’re solving a different problem.
2. A pick window, enforced. Berries are picked at the right shoulder colour, not the most convenient one, because that’s where the Brix is.
3. Pre-cooled fast, then pooled cold chain. Field heat is pulled out within hours, and crates move on a shared, temperature-controlled network — the same pooled cold-chain model behind Vegibus — so you’re not paying for a dedicated truck or for someone else’s spoilage.
4. Single-layer, calyx-up packing. The berries arrive in one inspectable layer, not crushed three-deep, so what you ordered is what you plate.

Behind the operation is M2labo Bharat Pvt. Ltd., the India arm of Japan’s M2Labo — backed by Suzuki — which matters when you need a supplier that will still be there next season.

Who we supply

ICHIGO is set up for restaurants, hotels, patisseries, cloud kitchens and premium retail — buyers who need the same grade every week, not a one-off gift box. If you plate desserts, run a bakery programme, build breakfast buffets, or stock a premium fruit aisle, you’re who this is for.

We currently serve the Mumbai–Pune corridor and Bengaluru, with cold-chain routes expanding. If your city isn’t on the route yet, tell us — routes follow demand.

How ordering works

It’s deliberately simple:

1. Sample. We send a sample box at the grade you’re considering. Smell it, slice it, plate it, push it under your lights.
2. Spec. We agree a grade, pack size and weekly volume against your menu.
3. Standing order. Berries arrive on a fixed schedule on the pooled cold chain. Invoicing on Net terms for established accounts.

No minimum-order theatre, no airfreight premium, no surprise substitutions.

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Source ICHIGO for your kitchen

Tell us your city, the dishes you’re building, and a rough weekly volume, and we’ll come back with grades, pack sizes, crate prices and the nearest delivery schedule.

→ Request a sample box and current crate prices on our contact page.

• 📞 Ishita Shroff — +91 98314 79900
• 📞 Mitesh Furia — +91 98207 73767
• ✉️ hr_info@m2-labo.in

ICHIGO™ — Japanese strawberry cultivars, grown in India. Produced by M2Labo (M2labo Bharat Pvt. Ltd.).