Our Journey
From iconic restaurant brand to global food sensation
Snowfox may not be known by everyone here in the UK (yet!), but you will surely have heard of our partner brand, YO!, and recognise it as one of the most successful sushi restaurant Japanese food brands in the country. The Snowfox story in the UK all begins there.
Our journey started back in 1997 when we introduced our first YO! Sushi restaurant to London, complete with our now iconic ‘kaiten’ conveyor belt system that we are sure you are all very familiar with. Our flagship outlet was met with fantastic success and we soon expanded right across the UK, increasing our presence to 53 company-owned restaurants and a further 19 franchise locations in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Dubai and Australia.
As the first choice sushi provider for millions around the world, we now also offer a range of licensed products in over 1500 UK supermarkets, with the YO! name synonymous with fantastic quality and delicious fresh food. Inspired by our love of Japanese food culture, we’ve even embraced innovative technologies you may have seen for yourself, including digital menus and even robot bussers!
As our success continued to grow and grow, we embarked on an ambitious new journey to embrace global food culture by merging with overseas partners who shared in our brand vision and business style. In 2017, YO! merged with Snowfox and Bento, who hold the #2 market position in the US, and #1 in Canada, respectively.
In 2018, we launched an exclusive partnership with Tesco to operate YO! kiosks in a number of their supermarket locations. With the huge scale of success experienced by these kiosks, and their counterparts in North America, we accelerated this expansion to include hundreds of Tesco locations, and also made a similar deal with Asda, operating as “Panku”. As of 2021, we came together with Bento and Snowfox and became the Snowfox Group, cementing our global position as a leading, multi-channel Japanese food business that exists to create better food for everyone, the Japanese way.
We are very proud of everything we achieved with all our new partners. We’ve proven that we are stronger together when we all share the same goals and values, but really this is still just the beginning.
The next phase of our journey starts with you!
