The price question
Why Is Sushi So Expensive? Bluefin, Labour and the Real Cost
Short answer: very little of it is the fish. The reason why sushi is so expensive is that a counter sells a perishable raw ingredient, bought in small quantities, cut by someone who trained for years, in a room that is paying rent on every empty seat.
The bill
Where the Cost Actually Goes
Asked directly, why is sushi so expensive has a dull answer: a plate of nigiri is priced like a service, not like seafood. In a British restaurant the food cost of a dish typically runs somewhere near a quarter to a third of its menu price; the rest covers wages, rent, business rates, waste and the 20% VAT that applies to a restaurant meal but not to the same fish bought at a counter to take home. That last line alone explains a good part of the gap a diner notices between a supermarket tray and a table.
Volume works against sushi as well. A kitchen that braises can buy cheap cuts in bulk and hold them for days. A sushi counter buys graded fish in small amounts, several times a week, and throws away what it does not sell — raw fish has a serviceable life measured in hours, not shelf life measured in weeks. Waste is not an accident in that model, it is a running cost, and it is priced in.
The outlier
Bluefin Is the Extreme, Not the Rule
Most reporting on sushi prices leans on bluefin tuna, which is misleading. Bluefin is a quota-managed species whose best fish are sold at auction to a handful of buyers, and the New Year auction at Tokyo’s Toyosu market is a publicity event rather than a market rate: in January 2019 the restaurateur Kiyoshi Kimura paid ¥333.6 million for a single 278kg bluefin, roughly £2.5 million, or about £9,000 a kilo.
Nothing on an ordinary menu is priced from that world. The salmon in front of most diners is farmed Atlantic salmon, a commodity that Norwegian aquaculture made cheap and abundant from the late 1980s onward, and it is one of the least expensive things a counter buys. Bluefin explains the ceiling. It does not explain the floor, and the floor is what the question is usually about.
The hands
Labour Is the Line Nobody Sees on the Bill
Labour is the cost that separates a sushi counter from a kitchen with a griddle. Rice has to be cooked, seasoned and held warm through a service; fish has to be broken down, graded, trimmed and cut to order; and the person doing it is not interchangeable with a line cook after a week of training. In Japan the apprenticeship behind that job is measured in years, and much of it is spent on rice before the knife comes out at all.
It is also labour that cannot be scaled by equipment. A machine can form rice, and plenty of high-volume operations use one, but the cutting and the pressing stay manual because both depend on judging a particular piece of fish. A counter of ten seats is therefore paying a skilled wage against a very small number of covers per hour — which is the reason the same fish costs one thing on a conveyor belt and something else entirely across a wooden counter.
The market
Why Is Sushi So Expensive in Britain Specifically
Geography adds a layer to why is sushi so expensive outside Japan. Japan buys most of its fish domestically and moves it short distances; a British restaurant is importing a good share of what it serves, chilled and fast, and paying for that speed. Prices also move with the room rather than with the ingredient: Bloomberg’s Sushinomics index, which tracked the price of a basic roll across American cities, found sushi prices rising 2.3% in 2017 against general inflation of 0.9%, with the spread between cities far larger than the spread between the fish itself.
The practical consequence is that the price of a piece says more about the address than the ocean. A ten-seat counter in central London and a supermarket tray of the same farmed salmon are two different businesses that happen to share an ingredient, and the reason why sushi is so expensive at one of them is mostly everything except the salmon.
Three settings
The Same Fish, Priced Three Different Ways
A useful way to see what is being paid for is to follow one ingredient — farmed Atlantic salmon — through the three places a British diner is most likely to meet it. The tray in a supermarket chiller, the plate on a conveyor belt and the piece formed by hand across a counter can all contain fish from the same supplier, graded the same way, at very close to the same wholesale price. Almost everything that differs between the three sits outside the fish.
The differences compound rather than add. A tray is machine-formed from a block, sold cold and zero-rated for VAT, and any unsold stock is written off across a national range where the loss disappears into a rounding error. A piece cut to order at a ten-seat counter is made by a trained pair of hands, sold with 20% VAT on top, and the fish that goes unsold that evening is a loss carried by that one room. By the time all of it is priced in, the same 15 grams of salmon can carry a fivefold difference between the cheapest and the most expensive version of itself.
Line by line
Where the Price Difference Actually Comes From
Six questions asked of the same ingredient in three settings. Only one of the six is about the fish.
| Attribute | Supermarket tray | Conveyor belt | Hand-formed counter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who forms it | Supermarket trayA machine, from a chilled block, in a packing plant. | Conveyor beltA machine forms the rice; a cook finishes the plate. | Hand-formed counterA person, one piece at a time, in front of the customer. |
| Who cuts the fish | Supermarket trayA machine, to a fixed thickness, hours or days before sale. | Conveyor beltA cook, in volume, before service opens. | Hand-formed counterA person, to order, for the piece being made. |
| Time between cutting and eating | Supermarket trayA day or more, chilled, up to a printed date. | Conveyor beltUp to a couple of hours on the belt. | Hand-formed counterMinutes, sometimes less. |
| VAT on the sale | Supermarket trayZero-rated: cold food taken away. | Conveyor belt20% if eaten in. | Hand-formed counter20%. |
| Service in the price | Supermarket trayNone. | Conveyor beltMinimal, and shared across a high seat turnover. | Hand-formed counterMost of the bill, divided across very few covers. |
| Who absorbs what is not sold | Supermarket trayA national range, where the loss is a rounding error. | Conveyor beltThe restaurant, discounted at the end of the belt. | Hand-formed counterThe restaurant, in full, that same evening. |
Still asked
Questions About Sushi Prices
Is the fish really the expensive part?
Usually not. For farmed salmon, the fish is one of the smaller lines in the cost of a piece; wages, rent, waste and VAT together account for far more of the menu price.
The exception is graded tuna, where a single loin can cost more than a week of wages — which is why tuna and salmon prices on the same menu are rarely comparable.
Why is bluefin tuna so much more expensive than salmon?
Bluefin is wild, slow-growing, quota-managed and cannot be farmed at scale, so supply is capped by regulation and biology. Atlantic salmon is farmed to order, which makes it predictable and cheap by comparison.
Why does supermarket sushi cost so much less?
Different business, and a different tax. Pre-packed sushi is machine-formed in volume, made from a narrow range of cheap species, and sold without table service or the 20% VAT a restaurant meal carries in the United Kingdom.
Put next to a tray from a chiller cabinet, why is sushi so expensive at a counter turns out to be a question about staff, seats and tax rather than about seafood.
Does an omakase counter charge more because the fish is better?
Partly, but the bigger factor is the ratio of staff to seats. A counter serving twelve people needs the same skilled hands as one serving forty, and the labour is divided across a third of the covers.
Has sushi actually got more expensive, or does it just feel that way?
Both, in different measures. Bloomberg’s 2017 Sushinomics index put sushi price growth at 2.3% against 0.9% general inflation, and imported chilled seafood has since absorbed higher freight and energy costs on top of that.