The strawberry yuzu pipette that comes taped to a matcha mochi is made out of the ends of the strawberries somebody cut that same morning.
Strawberries arrive by the pound and get cut before the doors open. The best whole berries go into ichigo daifuku, one to a piece. The next ones get sliced: two slices on a mochi, four in a Guava Yuzu Ade, eight in a Strawberry Yuzu Ade. What is left after that is tops, ends, and the halves that were never going to look right under a sheet of mochi.
Four hundred grams of that trim goes into a pipette batch, together with 220 grams of sugar, 80 grams of hot water, 18 grams of yuzu juice and 0.6 grams of salt. One batch fills 115 pipettes, which is one box. Each pipette holds four milliliters and none of them gets filled to the brim.
The part worth explaining is not the recipe. It is one flag on one line of it. The strawberry line is marked as a byproduct, and the note beside it reads "Byproduct of daily strawberry prep."
A byproduct line carries no cost. When the kitchen prices this pipette, those 400 grams of strawberry count as zero dollars, and the batch costs what the sugar, the water, the yuzu and the salt cost. That is not an accounting trick. The fruit was already bought and already paid for by the daifuku and the slices that used the good half of it. Charging the trim a second time would count the same pound of strawberries twice and make every pipette on the counter look more expensive than it is.
It also sets a ceiling. There is only ever as much trim as there was cutting, so the batch cannot be larger than the morning that produced it. One pipette goes out with one mochi, so a batch covers 115 of them and no more. On a light strawberry day there is less sauce, and the honest fix is to cut more strawberries for the daifuku, not to open a case of fruit for the pipettes.
The yuzu is the smallest number in the whole thing. Eighteen grams against four hundred grams of fruit, and it is the entire reason the sauce lands sharp instead of jammy.
Next time you get one, bite the mochi first and squeeze the pipette into the opening. It holds four milliliters, and it started the day as the end of a strawberry.