In 1985, when Molly Ringwald’s character in “The Breakfast Club” pulls out a bento box of sushi at the fictional Shermer High School, the other students are unnerved by this mystifying lunch.
In 2025, when lunch period starts at the real Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, a Chicago suburb similar to the movie’s setting, students race to line up at the sushi bar in the school cafeteria.
How did raw fish and seaweed become staples of the American diet?
In the ’80s, sushi had mystique. Although it was sold in vending machines and gas stations in Japan, in the United States it was a rarefied food that could be made only from pristine ingredients, by masters who had trained for decades.
But as sushi restaurants proliferated between the East and West Coasts, and as infrastructure was built for storing and transporting frozen seafood, American sushi became something else: convenience food.
In interviews, sushi chefs, marketers, researchers and wholesalers all agreed that the Covid pandemic prompted an unexpected, and enormous, spike in the American appetite for sushi.
As people tired of home cooking, and of takeout staples like pizza and burritos, sushi at home became popular, whether delivered from Nobu in Beverly Hills, or picked up from a Target in Minneapolis.
A spokesman for the Kroger supermarket chain, which has offered sushi since 1991 and claims to be the largest seller in the country, said sales have jumped by 50 percent since 2019, to a million rolls per day. Before the pandemic, to-go sushi was about 6 percent of total business across the 12 Blue Ribbon Sushi restaurants spread across the country from Boston to Los Angeles. Now, according to the co-owner Bruce Bromberg, it’s 30 percent.
The chef Masaharu Morimoto said that across his global restaurant group, to-go sushi sales doubled during the pandemic, and have remained high since the dining rooms reopened.
“We saw a whole new entrance of consumers into the category,” said Richard Barry of the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group of the biggest harvesters, processors, distributors and retailers in U.S. seafood. “The millennial consumer grew up with sushi,” he said. “It went from exotic to everywhere in one generation.”
Once a small niche of the seafood business, sushi is now the industry’s growth leader.
Most of that growth is not happening in $300-per-head omakase restaurants (though those are proliferating). It is happening in gas stations and big-box stores, bowling alleys and stadiums, U.S. Army commissaries and amusement parks.
Retail sushi, also called “deli sushi” because of its usual location in supermarkets, is one of the fastest-growing segments in supermarkets overall, according to Circana, a market research firm. In 2024, retail sushi was a $2.8 billion business, up 7 percent from 2023.
Because of this growing appetite, high-end restaurants are also investing in sushi to go.
At the Sugarfish restaurants in Southern California and New York City, each order is packed into a patented box created by Clement Mok, an esteemed digital designer who was the creative director of Apple from 1982 to 1988. “Visually, my influences were a white plate, a bento box and an Apple package,” he said.
Practically, the challenge was much harder: to match the takeout experience to the standards of Sugarfish’s founding sushi chef, Kazunori Nozawa: warm rice, cool fish, sauces brushed on at the last minute. He said the move from digital to analog design was difficult, working around parameters like the 30- to 60-minute window that Mr. Nozawa approved for consuming sushi after it is made, and testing dozens of cardboard samples to find one that didn’t absorb soy sauce and prevented warm rice from sticking.
The box has compartments for maki, sashimi and nigiri; a slot for a napkin and chopsticks; sauces in color-coded cups; and a visual guide printed on the underside of the lid, like a box of See’s chocolates.
He is still tinkering with the design, which was awarded a patent in 2017.
At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the sushi is made from scratch on campus, from farmed Norwegian salmon and Atlantic tuna netted off the New England coast. The school has won “Best Campus Food” from the Princeton Review nine times in a row.
According to Alexander Ong, the school’s culinary director, sushi consumption has grown 30 percent year over year since he came on in 2018, faster than any other type of food. He said the school’s 22,000 undergraduates, most of whom are on an all-you-can-eat meal plan, often visit the counter more than once: “they eat it first thing in the morning, and all day up until bedtime.”
Premade retail sushi, sold at places like gas stations, is produced for the mass market mainly by a few big companies: Bento, Fuji Foods, Hissho and AFC.
Most of it is made from cooked seafood like poached shrimp, fake crab and barbecued eel. Raw fish like tuna and salmon are thawed from slabs that have been superfrozen and held at minus 40 to minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which keeps the flesh intact and kills parasites. The sushi is rolled by machines at a central facility, packed into plastic tubs and shipped out daily.
Although the fish looks fresh, and is safe to eat as long as it is correctly handled, there are some built-in compromises that make grab-and-go sushi different from handmade. For example, federal food safety guidelines require keeping sushi (like other packaged foods, like sandwiches) chilled between 32 and 41 degrees. But that eliminates the temperature contrast between rice and fish. And, rice begins to harden as soon is it is refrigerated.
In the last decade, according to the C.D.C., there have been only two outbreaks of food-borne illness connected to the raw fish in sushi; in the same period, there have been dozens from poultry and beef.
Still, many consumers still have questions about the safety of eating raw fish, said Mr. Barry of the National Fisheries Institute. They also have concerns about the sustainability of the farmed fish that is used for less-expensive sushi.
On the other hand, there are concerns about the sustainability of the wild fish used for high-end sushi.
Last year, the fisheries institute formed a new “Sushi Council” to market the category by promoting food safety, sustainability and quality assurance with a “sushi-grade” label.
Darren Seifert, a food industry analyst Circana said sushi is a “unicorn” in the grab-and-go category: liked by both men and women, urban and suburban, young and middle-aged diners. It checks many boxes for health-conscious consumers: protein-rich, gluten-free, dairy-free, meatless and containing few ultraprocessed ingredients.
In the catering business, it’s popular as a no-cook, pescatarian and vegetarian option for what the industry calls “mass feeding events” like concerts, weddings and sports events.
Matt Straus, who runs corporate development for Tao Group, which provides sushi to Madison Square Garden’s skyboxes, said sushi bars are a key part of the group’s expansion plans.
“We can’t put a restaurant with a 20-foot Buddha in the center in every city in America,” he said. “But every city can have a sushi bar.”
As sushi becomes more popular in the United States, it is also becoming more Americanized. That transformation began in the 1970s with the invention of the inside-out California roll, which made sushi seem more approachable by hiding the seaweed and eliminating the raw fish. (The filling of surimi, or crab stick, is made of cooked and pressed pollock.)
Kamehachi is the oldest sushi bar in Chicago, run by Giulia Sindler, whose grandmother, Marion Konishi, first opened in the Old Town neighborhood in 1967. Ms. Konishi made traditional sushi — mostly nigiri, tekka maki and kappamaki — for the Japanese American community that clustered around the Midwest Buddhist Temple. Like her, many of them had left the West Coast after being interned in camps during World War II.
Ms. Sindler, 60, said that after nearly 60 years, the restaurant is well equipped for delivery and takeout, but she is troubled by the popular demand for ever more creative rolls, with ingredients like mango, jalapeño and cream cheese.
“The more we are exploring different rolls,” she said, “the more I worry about getting away from the origins of sushi.”
When she was growing up, Ms. Sindler said, sushi was still something only adventurous eaters in Chicago would try. Now, two generations have grown up with it. “I like to see the young kids come in with their grandparents and show them how it’s done.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
Julia Moskin is a Times reporter who covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking.
The post Sushi Is Bigger Than Ever in America. There’s One Main Reason. appeared first on New York Times.
