Asahi Group at the Osaka Expo: Forests, Craft Beer, and CO2-Absorbing Vending Machines
Walking into the Osaka-Kansai Expo 2025, the immediate impression is of a world in fast-forward — every pavilion competing to demonstrate the most dramatic technology, the most ambitious vision. Against that backdrop, the Asahi Group Japan installation read as something different: quieter in presentation, more deliberate in its ambitions, and more specific about what those ambitions actually meant.
The installation involved three distinct initiatives: craft beer brewed from food that would otherwise be wasted, a regenerated forest grown on land that had been wasteland, and CO2-absorbing vending machines that captured carbon as a byproduct of normal operation. Each of these was a real, working demonstration rather than a concept — the beer was being poured, the forest was growing, and the vending machines were absorbing carbon.
This article covers each of those initiatives in detail, drawing on conversations with Asahi staff at the expo and the demonstrations visitors could experience directly.
- Upcycled craft beer: food waste turned into something worth drinking
- The Expo Forest Project: 1,500 trees and an art installation
- CO2-absorbing vending machines: technical details and the scale-up plan
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Upcycled Craft Beer: Food Waste as Raw Material
The Asahi booth at the expo introduced two primary craft beers: one brewed from bread and one brewed from carrots. Both were made from food that had failed to reach conventional distribution — bread not sold before its window closed, carrots that didn't meet visual standards for retail. Limited-edition varieties using sweet potato (ebi-imo) and budo were also offered during the expo run.
Asahi's approach to food waste upcycling predates the expo by several years. Since 2021, the company has been redirecting coffee grounds, palm byproducts, and spent tea leaves into baked goods — dorayaki and baumkuchen — rather than letting them go to landfill. A collaboration with Lotte to produce craft beer from surplus food ingredients established the technical foundation for what was demonstrated at the expo. The result is beer with a noticeably cleaner finish than industrial alternatives, with mild bitterness and fruit-forward aroma — quality that held up under direct comparison.
The expo environment made the point more vividly than any press release could. Visitors who stopped to try the beer were tasting a product where the full process — from food that would have been discarded to a finished beverage on their palate — was visible and explicable. Staff on hand described the process, the sourcing decisions, and the partnerships with local farmers who supplied the raw materials.
Key features of the upcycled craft beer program:
- Food waste reduction: surplus and substandard agricultural produce used as primary ingredient rather than discarded
- Product range: bread and carrot beers as primary lines; sweet potato and grape as limited editions
- Fermentation approach: distinct from mass-market brewing; quality optimized for the specific properties of each ingredient
- Local sourcing: regional agricultural partnerships that also benefit local farming operations
- Sustainability framing: positioned as environmental action, not just product novelty
The Expo Forest Project: 1,500 Trees and an Art Installation
The forest occupying a central portion of the expo grounds wasn't planted for the occasion in any superficial sense. Asahi Group transplanted 1,500 trees onto 2 to 3 hectares of land that had previously been bare and unusable. The result was a living space that functioned simultaneously as ecological restoration and as the environment for an art installation.
The installation was designed around seven themes, with more than five distinct art placements distributed throughout the forest. The artist Pierre Huyghe contributed a moss-covered sculpture — deliberately placed to blur the boundary between the made and the growing, between permanence and decay. Visitors could touch the work, and the contrast of cold stone and living moss produced a physical experience that visual display alone cannot replicate.
Other works in the forest posed questions about life and non-life, growth and loss, and what it means to preserve something for future generations. One sculpture depicted a headless human form — an invitation to consider where the boundary between living and non-living actually sits. These weren't decorative elements. They were designed to make visitors stop and think.
The forest's backstory deepens its significance. Asahi Group has managed a 2,165-hectare forest in Hiroshima Prefecture — called "Asahi no Mori" — for decades. The project began with a pragmatic goal: finding domestic alternatives to the cork used in bottle caps. Over time, it became a serious long-term investment in forest management and environmental stewardship. The Expo Forest drew directly on that institutional knowledge.
For visitors walking through the space, the combination of ambient sound, changed air quality, living trees, and art works created something genuinely different from the pavilion experience elsewhere on the grounds. An Asahi staff member described the goal plainly: "We want visitors to feel the importance of nature — not just understand it conceptually, but feel it in the space they're moving through."
CO2-Absorbing Vending Machines: Technical Details and Scale-Up Plan
The third initiative was the one most likely to surprise visitors who assumed vending machines were simply sales infrastructure. The machines installed at the expo site — six in total — were equipped with CO2 absorption material derived from industrial byproducts. As the machines operated normally (selling drinks, managing temperature), they simultaneously captured CO2 from the surrounding air.
The numbers are specific. Each machine absorbs CO2 at a rate equivalent to approximately 20 cedar trees per year. With six machines at the expo site, the collective absorption effect equals roughly 120 cedar trees. The absorption material is ultimately processed into concrete or tiles — closing a cycle in which captured carbon becomes durable construction material rather than re-entering the atmosphere.
Power supply for the machines uses sodium-ion batteries charged by solar panels — a design choice that avoids rare metal dependency and reduces lifecycle environmental cost. This is not a peripheral detail: the full system design (vending + absorption + solar + sodium battery) was developed as an integrated approach, not a bolt-on add-on.
The scale-up ambition is significant. Asahi Group already had more than 1,500 of these machines deployed domestically at the time of the expo — including at prominent installations like Tokyo Skytree. The goal is 50,000 units nationally by 2030. The company's own description of how the concept originated is telling: informal conversation among executives about whether vending machines could be made to absorb CO2, evolving into a serious engineering program. The gap between casual idea and deployed technology, in this case, was closed.
For expo visitors, the experience of buying a drink from one of these machines was intentionally low-key. The machine looks like a vending machine. The information panels next to it explain what's happening inside. The quiet point being made: meaningful environmental action doesn't have to announce itself loudly. It can happen during an ordinary transaction.
Summary
Asahi Group's expo initiatives represent a coherent argument about what corporate sustainability looks like when it goes beyond branding. The craft beer is real food waste turned into a genuinely good product. The forest is real ecological restoration on land that was bare, with real art installed inside it. The vending machines are running, absorbing carbon, and are on a trajectory toward 50,000 units.
None of these were demonstrations of intentions or plans. They were operational things that visitors could taste, walk through, and stand next to. In an expo environment saturated with future-tense promises, that present-tense reality carried weight.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUSKKQbbJKA
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