The CEO of Sushiya, one of Ukraine's largest sushi-focused restaurant chains, has warned that a logistics collapse remains a real risk for the country's foodservice sector, pointing to mounting losses, restaurant closures and upward pressure on sushi prices across the market.

In an interview with LIGA.net, the chief executive laid out the operating reality for a chain whose core menu depends heavily on imported and long-haul inputs — fish, rice, nori and packaging — moving through supply channels that remain vulnerable to disruption. The warning about logistics is not abstract for a sushi operator: when inbound freight stalls, the cost of goods rises faster than menus can absorb, and the first casualties are unit-level margins.

What did the CEO say about losses and closures?

The executive confirmed that Sushiya has been operating at a loss, and that the chain has been forced to close restaurants. For a multi-unit operator, closures of this kind are typically a tool for cutting the weakest sites out of the portfolio — locations where rent, labor percentage and cost of goods no longer clear the threshold for profitability — rather than a signal of brand-level retreat.

The interview frames the closures within a broader profitability squeeze. Rising input costs, driven by logistics and supply-chain pressure, have compressed margins at a time when consumer spending power in Ukraine remains constrained. That combination leaves operators choosing between raising prices and accepting losses; Sushiya's leadership indicated the chain has done some of both.

Why is logistics the central issue for sushi operators?

Sushi is a category where sourcing risk is concentrated rather than distributed. A burger chain can re-engineer a menu around alternative proteins or local produce with modest reformulation. A sushi chain cannot easily replace imported fish with domestic supply, which means freight costs, border delays and currency movement hit the cost of goods directly and immediately.

The CEO's warning that "a logistics collapse is possible" reads as a sector-level alert, not only a company concern. If freight and import channels degrade further, the cost of core ingredients would rise industry-wide, pushing menu prices up in lockstep and testing whether Ukrainian consumers will keep paying sushi-category checks.

What happens to sushi prices?

Prices are already moving, according to the interview, and the direction is one-way so long as logistics costs remain elevated. For operators, the pricing question is a menu-engineering problem: how much of the input-cost increase can be passed to guests before transaction counts fall, and which items in the set-menu architecture can absorb cost increases without breaking the value perception that drives sushi delivery and dine-out occasions.

Sushiya's position as a large chain gives it scale advantages on procurement that independents lack, but scale does not insulate the company from the structural costs the CEO described. Losses at the chain level suggest that even the sector's larger players have not fully offset inflation through pricing and cost control.

What comes next?

The CEO's outlook ties recovery to stabilization of supply chains and consumer demand rather than to any single operational fix. The company intends to keep managing its portfolio — closing what does not work, pricing for what does — while pressing the case that logistics reliability is now a decisive variable for Ukraine's restaurant industry. How sushi pricing settles in the coming months will serve as a visible test of whether foodservice input costs have peaked or still have room to climb.