Foodies Manga Ends After One Year — What Tadashi Agi and Jun Nakanishi's Series Was About
Discusses the confirmed shape of Foodies' ending and its overall premise. Full spoilers for how the series wraps its recruitment-battle plot, though no specific chapter details are available to spoil. If you haven't read it, stop here.
Kodansha's food-industry manga "Foodies" has wrapped its serialization on the Comic Days platform, according to Anime News Network's report on September 21, 2026. It's a quiet ending for a series that never ran especially long — roughly a year and a month, all told — but it's worth pausing on for a couple of reasons: the writer behind it is a familiar name to anyone who's followed food manga before, and the premise itself is a fairly distinctive spin on the "rival companies competing for talent" setup that other workplace-drama series have used before. Here's what's actually confirmed about the ending, what the series was about, and who made it.
The ending, as confirmed
According to Anime News Network, the final chapter of "Foodies" was posted to Kodansha's Comic Days website on September 16, 2026. That chapter is currently sitting behind whatever access restriction Comic Days uses for its newest releases, but it becomes free to read for anyone starting September 30, 2026 — a two-week window that's fairly standard for how digital manga platforms like Comic Days stagger access between paying early readers and everyone else.
No specific final chapter number was disclosed in the reporting, so it's not possible to say precisely how many chapters "Foodies" ran for in total. What is confirmed is the volume count: the series published four collected tankōbon volumes, with the fourth and final volume releasing July 17, 2026. That means the manga's print run closed out about two months before the digital serialization itself actually finished — a gap that's common enough for ongoing series, where the print volumes trail the latest web chapters by a chapter or two, but which briefly leaves the final chapter or handful of chapters only available in their original Comic Days posting rather than collected in a tankōbon yet.
Just as notably, no reason was given anywhere in the available reporting for why the series ended when it did. That's worth stating plainly rather than guessing at: there's no confirmation this was a planned finale reached on the creators' own terms, and there's equally no confirmation it was a cancellation driven by sales or editorial pressure. The honest answer, based on what's actually been reported, is that Kodansha and the creative team simply haven't said, and nothing here should be read as filling in that blank.
What Foodies was actually about
"Foodies" launched on Comic Days in August 2025, which puts its total run at roughly one year and one month by the time the final chapter posted. The premise centers on Takumi Itadaki, introduced as the grandson of a legendary chef, whose company assigns him to launch a gourmet and restaurant review website from scratch. Rather than trying to build out that website's credibility through conventional means, Takumi's approach is to seek out "foodie hunters" — the series' term for genuine "Foodies," people who hold rare, highly specialized knowledge about food, ingredients, or specific cuisines — and recruit them to produce the kind of standout, authoritative reviews a generic review site couldn't match.
That premise gives the series its central engine: a talent war. Takumi's efforts to build his roster of specialist reviewers run directly into competition from Tenshoku, a rival food company that's racing to sign the same pool of top reviewers and specialists before Takumi's team can get to them. Rather than framing its conflict around cooking competitions or restaurant rivalries in the way a lot of food manga default to, "Foodies" builds its drama around recruitment — who can identify and land the right specialist first, and what it takes to convince someone with genuinely rare food expertise to put that knowledge behind one company's website instead of another's.
That's a fairly distinctive hook for the genre. Food manga tend to lean on cooking duels, restaurant-saving arcs, or a chef's personal growth as their structural backbone. Building a series instead around corporate talent acquisition — treating specialized food knowledge itself as the valuable, contested resource, rather than a dish or a kitchen — gives "Foodies" a workplace-drama shape underneath its food-industry setting, closer in spirit to a business manga that happens to be about food than a traditional cooking story.
The creative team behind it
The writing credit on "Foodies" goes to Tadashi Agi, which is a pen name rather than the writer's actual identity. According to Anime News Network's encyclopedia entry, "Tadashi Agi" is one of several pseudonyms used by Shin Kibayashi, a prolific manga writer born July 22, 1962, in Tokyo, who's published extensively across multiple names over a long career — also including Seimaru Amagi and Yuma Ando, among others. As Tadashi Agi specifically, Kibayashi works food- and wine-themed material in collaboration with his sister, Yuko Kibayashi.
The Tadashi Agi name is best known for "Drops of God" — Kami no Shizuku in Japanese — a wine-appreciation manga that became successful enough to spawn multiple live-action television adaptations as well as an anime adaptation. That's the reference point most readers familiar with Agi's work would bring to "Foodies": a writer with an established track record specifically in food-and-drink-industry manga that treats specialized expertise and connoisseurship as dramatic material in its own right, which lines up closely with the "foodie hunter" recruitment premise at the center of this newer series.
Beyond the Tadashi Agi name, Kibayashi's broader body of work spans a wide range of genres. Also credited to him are GetBackers, Bloody Monday, The Kindaichi Case Files, The Knight in the Area, and Gifted — the last of which was also adapted into a live-action television series. That's a career built substantially on IP that travels well beyond the manga page itself, with "Foodies" joining a body of work where multiple entries have found second lives in live-action or animated adaptations.
Artist duties on "Foodies" went to Jun Nakanishi, handling the illustration side of the series, while original concept and research is credited to Shokichi — a research-credit structure that's fairly typical for food manga, where verifying culinary detail and industry accuracy often falls to a dedicated contributor separate from the writer and artist.
A run shorter than Agi's other food manga
It's worth putting "Foodies"'s roughly one-year, four-volume run in context against Agi's best-known prior work. "Drops of God" built its reputation over a much longer serialization and a much larger footprint — enough to justify multiple live-action adaptations across different television productions plus an eventual anime. "Foodies," by comparison, wrapped in a little over a year with four collected volumes, a noticeably more compact run for a creator whose most famous food-manga work sustained itself for considerably longer.
That's not, on its own, evidence of anything beyond the fact that different series find different audiences and different runtimes — plenty of manga run a year or two and end well within their own planned scope. But given that no reason for the ending has been disclosed, the contrast with "Drops of God"'s much longer run is at least a useful data point for readers trying to gauge how "Foodies" performed relative to its creator's most recognizable prior success, even if it can't answer the question definitively either way.
What's not confirmed here
A couple of points are worth flagging explicitly rather than folding into the rest of the piece as settled fact. First, sourcing on the exact release date of Volume 1 is thin — only Go Nagai World reports an October 2025 release for the first collected volume, and that detail isn't corroborated by Anime News Network's coverage. It's plausible given the August 2025 Comic Days launch, but it should be treated as lightly sourced rather than fully confirmed.
Second, there's a similarly thin claim about "Drops of God"'s anime adaptation reportedly streaming via Crunchyroll starting April 10, 2026 — again sourced only to Go Nagai World and absent from the Anime News Network article used for the rest of this piece. Given that it concerns a different, earlier series rather than "Foodies" itself, it's tangential to the main story here, but it's the kind of detail that's easy to state with more confidence than the sourcing actually supports, so it's flagged rather than presented as fact.
Finally, and probably most relevant to readers wondering whether they can actually pick "Foodies" up: no English licensing or publication information exists for the series in either source reviewed for this piece. There's no confirmation of a Western publisher picking up the manga, no digital English serialization platform mentioned, and nothing to suggest an overseas release is imminent. For now, "Foodies" appears to be a Japanese-language-only release, collected across its four volumes and archived on Comic Days.
Where this leaves the series
Taken together, what's actually confirmed about "Foodies" is fairly narrow but clear: it ran on Comic Days for about thirteen months starting in August 2025, closed out its print run at four volumes with the last one published in mid-July 2026, and posted its final chapter on September 16, 2026, ahead of that chapter going free to read on September 30. Nothing about why it ended has been disclosed, and nothing about an English release has materialized. What's left behind is a premise — Takumi Itadaki's recruitment war against Tenshoku over the food industry's rarest specialist reviewers — that stood out for building its drama around talent acquisition rather than cooking contests, from a writer whose pen name carries real weight in the food-manga space thanks to "Drops of God." Whether "Foodies" gets picked up for translation or adaptation the way Agi's more famous series did remains, like the reason for its ending, simply unannounced for now.
The final chapter is already posted on Comic Days and becomes free to read starting September 30, 2026. No reason for the ending has been disclosed, and no English release exists yet, so the next real signal to watch for is whether Kodansha or a Western publisher announces any kind of overseas licensing for the series' four collected volumes.