Bento Expo.

NHK WORLD-JAPAN created and produced Bento Expo to introduce bento culture to viewers around the world. I appeared in the 2016 pilot, Bento: The Global Lunchbox Project, then co-hosted the series with Maki Ogawa through its conclusion in March 2025.

Across nine seasons, the program combined recipes, practical techniques, viewer submissions, and stories from Japan and elsewhere. It reached more than 160 countries through the network's international distribution.

I cooked, demonstrated, tasted, interviewed guests, and helped explain the culinary and practical logic behind a well-packed bento.

Maki and I brought different strengths to the same lunchbox. She showed how cute details and visual ideas can give a bento personality. I focused on cooking technique and the mechanics of packing food so it remains appealing when it is opened hours later.

That included using a rainbow of colors to make a meal more attractive and balanced, packing a small box snugly so the contents do not shift, and using leafy separators to divide foods without wasting space. It also meant thinking about texture, temperature, leftovers, and how a recipe would hold up away from the kitchen.

Together, those perspectives let the show present bento as both creative and practical.

Viewer submissions made the format's flexibility visible. The ingredients and cuisines changed, but the underlying questions were familiar: how to make a portable meal nutritious, economical, compact, and enjoyable.

Rather than treating bento as a fixed set of Japanese dishes, the series showed it as a meal framework that could be applied to almost any cuisine. The Japanese context remained important, but viewers were given principles they could use with the food available to them.

During the run, Maki and I also co-authored Ultimate Bento. It uses 85 recipes in a mix-and-match format to build 25 lunches and received a 2020 Gourmand Food Culture Award.

The series helped introduce bento culture to an international audience without asking viewers to reproduce a Japanese lunch exactly. It gave them a flexible way to make portable meals more colorful, balanced, compact, and personal.

See Marc's full television, interview, and press record on the Media page.