Like many tourists visiting Japan, I fell in love with onigiri, plump triangles of rice wrapped in thin sheets of roasted seaweed called nori. They were ubiquitous and cheap, less serious than sushi but still a delight to eye and palate, the perfect solution for that sudden hunger pang. So when I read that the snacks were available at branches of Marks & Spencer Group and Waitrose in London, I had to check them out.
Traditionally, onigiri are homemade and hand-finished; the rice gets wrapped in nori just before you bite into it, otherwise the crisp, umami-packed green sheet gets soggy. Under Toshifumi Suzuki — the entrepreneur who brought the 7-Eleven chain to Japan in the 1970s — packaging for store-bought onigiri evolved with a plastic film separating the nori from the rice. They then combine after pulling on three numbered tabs. It’s so easy and so clever that you want to buy another just to enjoy the engineering again. Japan’s convenience stores sell about 6 billion onigiri each year.
So how do the British incarnations rate? At M&S, which introduced its Kando brand in the spring of 2025, the snack is encased in a plastic case that gives off toolkit vibes. The nori is reduced to a strip, maybe to accommodate British reticence toward seaweed; the word “onigiri” was only certified in English in 2024 by becoming an Oxford English Dictionary entry. Perhaps to domesticate it further, the edges of the M&S onigiri are sprinkled with a mixture of sesame seeds and bits of another kind of seaweed that give the product the look of a triangular sandwich.
Dining and Cooking