When I worked for Universal Studios Japan as a burger-flipper, I took my breaks at the company cafeteria. Unlike the park itself which features overpriced Western food, the cafeteria was all your typical Japanese fare – curry rice, soba in fish stock, ramen, fried pork cutlets, you get the idea. Never in a million years did I think a place like this would become anything more than a tolerated necessity.

Boy was I wrong. Now the employee cafeteria for Tanita, a company that makes digital scales and other body monitors, has become a sensation. Last year a cookbook based on the shop’s healthy menu items became a bestseller, and this year a Tanita Shokudo restaurant recently opened to the public near Tokyo Station to enormous buzz.

It’s funny how anything can become a phenomenon if you can market it the right way. In Tanita’s case, promoting their healthy-yet-delicious cafeteria was good way to play up the firm’s products. Also, Tanita is a household name now, which makes it much easier to start conversations with potential distributors.

And the publisher obtained a fresh angle to differentiate itself in the crowded healthy cookbook market. There is a certain WTF factor when you hear that such an ordinary-seeming place like a company cafeteria is suddenly the talk of the town. That edge has no doubt eroded by now since the emergence of many copycat books. I bought one with recipes from an Adachi-ku school cafeteria and so far have been pretty pleased with it. The pumpkin soup was especially memorable.

According to an article in the Nikkei (sub), the Tanita book came about after a publisher saw a puff piece on the Tanita cafeteria on NHK. And interestingly, the company president claims that the cafeteria itself originated in a discontinued promotion where the company operated a facility where people could talk to a nutritionist and learn healthy recipes. After the center closed, the company incorporated the recipes in the cafeteria menu.