Column: Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters continue to pop up alongside food in O.C.

Nestled into the backside of a rolling hillscape in the middle of Irvine lies Tanaka Farms, one of the last remaining swaths of food-producing land in once-pastoral Orange County. At 30 acres, the family-owned farm is small but mighty, famous for its year-round produce stand and Community Supported Agriculture memberships as well as popular tourism, education and agro-tainment programming.

But visitors to Tanaka Farms’ annual pumpkin patch and Christmas tree lot this fall were greeted by a few familiar, if unexpected, faces: Hello Kitty, Pochacco, Keroppi, My Melody and Chococat.

These Sanrio characters — who wear gardening gear for staged photo ops placed throughout the farm and have been incorporated into its tractor tours and merchandise — are part of a year-long partnership between Tanaka Farms and the Japanese lifestyle brand. Sanrio is increasing the company’s visibility in the American food sector: for the holidays, the characters donned winter clothes for a pop-up Sanrio Village on the farm.

Yet Tanaka Farms isn’t the only place you’ll stumble across Sanrio characters alongside your food in Orange County right now. In fact, the region is home to a handful of culinary partnerships, licensing ventures and promotions involving the company’s expanding lineup of adorable Japanese characters.

From the Hello Kitty Cafe Pop-Up Container at the Irvine Spectrum and the recently launched Gudetama-themed dishes at Japanese restaurant Curry House to Hello Kitty wines available at your local specialty retailer, Sanrio characters are infusing themselves more and more into our everyday eating experiences.

“Food continues to be a significant area for Sanrio to evolve our offerings and focus to deliver new, distinctive and surprising experiences to fans,” says David Marchi, vice president of brand management and marketing for Sanrio. “This comes in part from seeing the proliferation of unique Sanrio character cafes, restaurant and food offerings in Asia and wanting to share those experiences with fans in the U.S.”

Sanrio first entered the restaurant business in the 1970s, though these original incarnations were more in themed decor than the meals themselves. Throughout the following decades, the company went through more food collaborations, including products that allowed you to cook with Sanrio at home, a series of character cafes and more special promotions (Hello Kitty-shaped sandwiches, anyone?) both at its own theme park just outside of Tokyo and in other places like Korea and Taiwan.

Stateside, the culinary offerings are much more recent, with the first Hello Kitty McDonald’s Happy Meal that appeared in 2000 and the first official themed menus launching to coincide with Hello Kitty’s Three Apples exhibition in Los Angeles in 2009.

For Hello Kitty’s 40th anniversary in 2014, Irvine-based collaborative partners Allan Tea, Charlie Chien and Urania Chien brought an entirely new concept to life — the Hello Kitty Cafe Truck, which continues to rove around the country with custom sweets for sale, making sell-out appearances in cities like New York, St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Seattle.

“I’ve gone with the truck to some of the different cities it visits and we get everybody from kids all the way up to grandparents,” Urania says of Sanrio’s diverse fan base. “It’s amazing to see the lives that Hello Kitty has touched.”

The current O.C. Sanrio food invasion, though, didn’t start until last summer, when Urania, her husband, Charlie, and Tea opened the Hello Kitty Cafe Pop-Up Container at the Irvine Spectrum. An expanded and semi-permanent version of the original truck, the pop-up serves custom super-cute pastries and sweet pink drinks from a repurposed shipping container in the shadow of the Spectrum’s giant Ferris wheel.

Everything from Hello Kitty macarons and bow-topped cookies to rainbow-sprinkled cakes are baked and decorated at an Irvine facility then delivered to the Hello Kitty Cafe Pop-Up Container each day. Employees pull espresso shots for coffee drinks and shake up made-to-order teas and lemonades. It also doesn’t hurt that both the food and the bright-pink container plastered with Hello Kitty imagery pop even more when viewed on Instagram.

“When our Hello Kitty cafe was created, it was always the concept of a European bakery with a Hello Kitty twist,” says Urania, who grew up collecting Hello Kitty merchandise and has visited some of the other Hello Kitty cafe concepts in Asia. “We thought O.C. would be a great place because we live here and we love living here.”

The success of Sanrio’s Orange County food partnerships — which in addition to the pop-up cafe and Tanaka Farms also includes a Gudetama menu at Irvine’s Curry House — is in the fact that they are all experiential.

Instead of merely buying pens and notebooks and memorabilia branded with your favorite Sanrio character (which, let’s be honest, may sit in a drawer for decades as a collectible item), these collaborations invite you to spend a few hours or an entire day with them, building even stronger connections as they become incorporated into your daily life.

“Visiting one of the Hello Kitty cafes is something you’re going to look back on and cherish forever,” says Urania, noting that the Irvine pop-up is going to be leaving in the middle of January but that something else may be on the way (stay tuned). “The experiences that get shared over food and the memories that are made are the most amazing part of it all.”

SARAH BENNETT is a freelance journalist covering food, drink, music, culture and more. She is the former food editor at L.A. Weekly and a founding editor of Beer Paper L.A. Follow her on Twitter @thesarahbennett.