Japan’s beef bowl king, Yoshinoya, releases new line of canned, ready-to-eat beef bowls

Or maybe we should call them “beef cans?” Either way, these things will be literal life-savers.

Yoshinoya boasts convenient locations all across Japan, extremely reasonable prices, and tasty food that’s relatively healthy, so there’s really not much need to get out your pots and pans if you’ve got a branch in your neighborhood. Actually, you don’t even need a branch nearby, thanks to the company’s newest offering: canned Yoshinoya beef bowls.

The tinned meals come ready-to-eat, requiring no cooking. Simply pop the top, grab your chopsticks, and dig in.

But while the standard gyudon (beef bowl) is Yoshinoya’s primary claim to fame, over the year the chain has expanded its menu to include a number of other rice bowls, many of which are also making the jump to canned food.

The complete canned Yoshinoya lineup consists of six choices, with the standard beef bowl joined by yakiniku beef, yakitori chicken…

…pork, ginger pork…

…and even salted grilled mackerel, for those craving seafood.

You might notice that instead of the white rice usually used for Yoshinoya’s menu items, all of the canned versions used brown rice instead, specifically Kin no Ibuku rice grown in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. That’s a decision that was made because of brown rice’s higher nutritional value compared to white rice, because while Yoshinoya has long been a metaphorical life-saver for students, bachelors, and other demographic groups that are generally too busy and/or lazy to cook for themselves, the canned Yoshinoya meals are meant to be literal life-savers, and are designed to be kept on hand as emergency supplies for disaster preparedness.

This isn’t Yoshinoya’s first foray into natural disaster countermeasures, either. When a powerful earthquake struck Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture in 2016, Yoshinoya, as well as beef bowl chain rival Sukiya, dispatched mobile kitchens to the area to hand out free meals to victims of the quake.

Of course, there’s no rule against buying the cans to keep on hand and eating them when your personal emergency is just “being really hungry and not wanting to cook.” The canned Yoshinoya meals can be purchased through the company’s online shop here, where sets of one each of the six flavors or six-can bundles of a single type are identically priced at 4,860 yen (US$45) (except for the six-can set of mackerel, which is slightly cheaper at 4,590 yen.

Source: Yoshinoya via Entabe
Top image: Yoshinoya
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