In May of this year, Issei Mochi Gummies announced its nationwide launch at Walmart stores. In 2023, Walmart selected the brand from thousands of applicants for its covered “Golden Ticket” award at Walmart’s Open Call.

The brand then expanded to more than 350 Albertsons Companies Inc.’s banner stores, including Albertsons, Safeway, Shaw’s, Star Market, Jewel-Osco, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Vons, Pavilions, and Market Street.

At May’s Sweets & Snacks Expo, Issei Mochi Gummies also won a 2024 Most Innovative New Product Award, the Small Business Innovator Award, for its Dark Chocolate Covered Strawberry Mochi Gummies. The company was also awarded one of the thirteen coveted awards for Small Business Innovator.

The gummies are shelf-stable, vegan, kosher, and free of gluten, dairy, soy, and nuts. In addition, the treats are devoid of GMOs, animal-derived gelatin, and artificial preservatives, colors, and flavors.

“I have two boys and they love gummies. They were always asking for some kind of chewy candy, and I was really frustrated that the majority of the gummies out there were full of junk—artificial colors, flavors—and made with animal-derived gelatin. So I started to bake mochis at home, cutting them into small pieces and calling them mochi gummies. My kids loved them. Their friends loved them. Their parents loved them and several parents told me I should drop everything and pursue this. That is how it all started,” says Mika Shino, founder, Issei Mochi Gummies.

Shina was able to emulate the chewy texture of gelatin by using a mixture of rice and tapioca flours. “Rice and tapioca are naturally chewy, sticky, highly viscous ingredients. So I knew using these Asian ingredients would create the kind of chewy texture that my kids craved. It took us 3 years of research, trials, and tests—and we are still constantly doing R&D to improve the texture, flavor, and shelf-stability,” Shino shares.

The gummy is both vegan and gluten-free, and Shino says that rice and tapioca are naturally vegan and gluten-free, so she didn’t have to make a “special effort” to improve the product. “Many foods in Japan, for example, are gluten-free because so much of our food is rice-based. Wheat is historically a new ingredient for Asia from the West,” she notes. The gummies have a soft, chewy, pillowy texture, somewhere between a gummy bear and a marshmallow.

Mochi has thrived in Japanese culture for over a millennia, and it’s considered a treasured, sacred food, offered to the gods for New Year for prosperity and good health, Shino adds.

“It is also a culinary practice that brings communities together, with communal pounding of rice for important occasions like weddings and graduation. You can find ancient paintings depicting the art of mochi pounding with a mortar and pestle which continues to this day. Today, you can find mochi everywhere in Japan—in supermarkets, boutiques, restaurants—but it is still mainly sold as a fresh, baked cake filled with different kinds of fillings like sweet red bean paste like in ancient times, even though there are newer kinds of mochi cakes, like mochi ice cream, or mochi filled with fresh cream and strawberries,” she notes.

“Our mochi gummies are a completely new take on the traditional mochis—the world’s first and an innovation. There is a soft, long chew akin to marshmallows, but it’s shelf-stable and presented as candy, not as a fresh baked good or a frozen treat. I made our gummies with mochis because I knew I could recreate/re-invent the kind of chew my kids were craving with the gelatin-based gummies with a mochi-inspired concept. It was a very long road to figuring out how to make it clean-label and shelf stable,” Shino comments.

The brand is looking forward to innovating more in the years ahead. “We have a really exciting innovation pipeline and we are so looking forward to the months ahead. There is so much you can do with rice, tapioca, and many other ingredients which were long ignored in the snack/candy space. There are also so many global flavors that have not been tapped into through candy. We are so excited to keep creating, innovating, trying out new ideas and widening the scope of how we define candy, snacks, and other food items, pushing for diversity and inclusion in the food industry,” she finishes. SF&WB