Haruki Nishimura spent seven years as a pastry chef at a hotel in Yokohama before he started making granola on a Sunday afternoon in 2017. He had been dissatisfied with every commercial granola he could find in Japan: too sweet, too uniform, baked at temperatures that drove off the oils before they could do anything interesting. He bought a second-hand convection oven from a retiring baker in Zushi, carried it up three flights of stairs, and spent the next four months testing ratios of oats, kokuto, and sesame oil until the apartment smelled the way he wanted it to smell.
The name Cedar Vaultline came from a notebook sketch Haruki made in the winter of 2017. He was thinking about the way a cedar barrel holds whisky. The wood breathing slowly, the contents changing over months. He wanted the brand to carry that same sense of patient transformation. The first proper batch sold out at a Setagaya farmers market in March 2018. He had made 30 bags. By June of that year he had moved production into a licensed food-preparation kitchen in Ofuna and hired one part-time assistant. The current team is three people, and the kitchen is still in Ofuna.
Today Cedar Vaultline ships to customers across Japan and to a small number of wholesale accounts in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Sapporo. The range has grown from two blends to seven, with one or two limited seasonal roasts each year. Haruki still does the final quality check on every batch himself, tasting from a small ceramic bowl he bought at a Setagaya pottery stall in 2018. The bowl has a chip on the rim now. He has no plans to replace it.
Founder
Haruki Nishimura trained as a pastry chef at the Yokohama Grand Pacific Hotel, where he spent seven years working the breakfast and patisserie sections. In 2017 he began experimenting with granola in his Setagaya apartment, driven by a specific frustration: every commercial granola he tasted was over-sweetened and under-roasted. He founded Cedar Vaultline in 2018 after selling out 30 bags at a local farmers market. Outside the kitchen, he collects mid-century Japanese ceramics and walks the Miura Peninsula coast most Sunday mornings before the oven goes on.
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