Seiwa Market enters a crowded Asian Market

By Bryan Tsunoda on August 1st, 2016

Seiwa took over the spot where Fresh and Easy resided.

Japanese grocer Seiwa Market recently opened on Hawthorne boulevard in Torrance. Since they set up shop only a hop, skip and a jump from Marukai Market, I was curious about what they offered.

I later found out that the grocery chain is owned by Hidejiro Matsu, founder of Marukai Market. Knowing that, I’m sure the strategy was to set up in a popular location and compete directly with Marukai.

Good looking fruit

Seiwa offers very high quality produce. The greens looked crisp and fresh and the fruits and vegetables were full of color. In fact, the white peaches looked so good, I picked up a couple.

I was a bit surprised that the produce section was confined to a single aisle of the store. While they offered lettuce and most of the common Asian greens, they were certainly not even close to the variety that H-Mart offers. My wife asked me to pick up some corn on the cob and they did not have it on hand.

Refrigerated items are largely behind tall display cases with glass doors. Almost nothing was in an open refrigerated container. Because of this, the store’s temperature was comfortable and not cold. The con is that it was easy to miss something because it was behind a glass door.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

You have to open the doors to really see what they have.

Many of the Japanese staples such as miso, natto and tofu are plentiful. Of them, you will find the most basic version, one that may have a specialized flavor and a gourmet version. It was interesting to see how many items and brands that I’ve never seen before.

Seiwa’s baked goods were rather limited. They had the required shokupan white bread and had a fair number of wrapped Japanese pastries. I do not recall seeing a refrigerated case with cakes.

Like the closed refrigerated cases, they had numerous frozen cases. Sweets mostly consisted of the typical green tea and mochi ice cream flavors. Seiwa had an extensive set of frozen items available from meat, seafood, vegetables and prepared food. What surprised me was that I saw frozen daikon radish and sweet potatoes.

A nice variety of sake

Liquor was limited to a single aisle. They had Japanese beer such as Asahi and Sapporo in both glass and 12 pack cans. Their sake offerings were impressive and many of them were in the refrigerated case. Most of the Japanese markets only offer the small bottles (300 ml or less) and Seiwa had the large 1.8L bottles.

These turned out to be just like flavored kit kats.

Unlike Marukai that offers a Japanese American experience, Seiwa primarily features Japanese products or items that appeal to people who have just moved here from Japan. Unlike Marukai, I didn’t see any spam, Hawaiian coffee, Hawaiian macadamia nuts or spam musubi. The biggest surprise was that I didn’t see prepared food such as sushi, yakisoba, teriyaki or bento meals.

It will be interesting to see how they fare against the well-established Marukai Market.

Seiwa Market