Ryou Kuroyanagi (黒柳 亮 Kuroyanagi Ryō?)
The 22-year-old head at the main Pantasia branch, and a Harvard graduate with a Food Science diploma (There he had a girlfriend named Cathy but they got separated when he needs to go back to Japan). His passion and talent is food tasting, at which he excels.
He has incredible physical senses, as he could deduce the cooking and fermentation times as well as the proportions of ingredients of a loaf of bread just by smelling it: he is even used as a sniffer to track down a runaway Suwabara during the match in Ōmagari. His strait-laced no-nonsense attitude belies his very silly quirk of making strange pun-based reactions to the delicious bread he's eating (during the match in Uppurui he married an extremely ugly woman just for the sake of a pun, getting a divorce five minutes later.)
He used to be the student of Ken, but Ken drove Ryou away with his behaviour. He is given the opportunity by Yuuichi Kirisaki to fully utilize his skills as a judge for the Yakitate!! 25 competition (episode 9 in the anime). As shown in episode 60 he cares about bread more than he cares about his or anyone elses life. Ken and Tsukino called him a bread zombie. He is also one of the many people who make fun of Kawachi.
Voice
- Takehito Koyasu