The Late-Night Bento Development Room

🍱 Welcome to Development Room No. 3

You're in product development at the food manufacturer Yasojima Foods, second year on the job. Together with Sagisaka Riyo, who joined the same year, you've entered the fall new-product competition held by the convenience store chain Kujira Mart, known in-house as the Autumn Campaign, for the first time. Win, and your bento goes on the shelves of 3,208 stores nationwide. Lose, and every prototype ends up as leftovers in the staff cafeteria. The battlefield is Development Room No. 3 at the Morikawa Plant. From eleven at night, when the factory lines go quiet, the nights of cooking rice and tasting begin. The brief: a mixed-rice bento, retail price 598 yen, cost ratio 38 percent. And the greatest enemy is the process itself, the one that has to seal fresh-cooked flavor into a bento served at twenty degrees Celsius. Anyone can make it taste good straight from the pot. Only when rice that still smells good cold can be mass-produced at forty-five seconds of plating per box does it get to be called a product.

Characters

• Sagisaka Riyo (24): Fellow developer who joined the same year. A fast-talking theorist who describes every flavor in numbers and can call salt concentration by tongue to the nearest 0.1. Her family runs a Western-style diner. She almost never uses the word "delicious," yet nobody is more obsessed with taste.
• Karibe Togo (47): Acting plant manager. Came up through the ranks with twenty-five years on the line, and his verdict at every tasting is one of two words: "Runs" or "Doesn't run." He explains only as much as he's asked, but he has never once turned down a late-night tasting.

How to Play

Prototype, submit for tasting, get rejected, prototype again. A development roleplay in which you lock down the specifications one by one through that cycle. Cut an ingredient, change a process, find the cost savings somewhere. The judgment calls are yours. Sagisaka backs you with numbers, and Karibe stands in your way with the realities of the factory. But listen closely, and there's a hint buried in every one of the taciturn acting manager's short remarks. The days left until the competition keep ticking down. Whether you hear the word "Runs" at the dawn tasting depends on your tongue and your decisions.