Our Story

We began our journey in 1962 as Audio-Technica an audio equipment manufacturer in Tokyo, Japan. In the 1980’s when vinyl records were taken over by CD’s and our focus was on turntable needles, we held an employee “idea contest” to create a breaking new product; the result was a toy sushi maker for children. In 1984, we combined the audio turntable concept and the toy sushi maker to create “ASM50 Nigirikko,” the world’s first automatic sushi maker for home use, prompting the special machinery division AUTEC to be born.

Nigirikko allowed consumers to have one machine that easily made shari (sushi rice) and mold it into nirigi rice balls which became an instant country-wide success. As sales continued to rise, we received numerous inquiries of “if and when” an industrial-use model would be coming out. Impossible to ignore, our development team quickly went into work automating Nigirikko’s shari mechanisms and created AUTEC’s first sushi robot for industrial use that produced 900 nigiri rice balls per hour.

Today, AUTEC’s sushi robot line has expanded from Nigiri robots to Maki (for roll type) robots, Omusubi (rice balls) robots, sushi conveyor belts and sushi rice mixers to meet the unique needs of businesses from 50 countries around the world.