Founding Nippun Reishoku and spinning out frozen food manufacturing (1996)

A company that prepared the receiving vessel first

FY1996, the year total wheat demand stopped growing, was also the year Nippun Reishoku was established. Within the company-wide restructuring led by President Sawada Hiroshi from 1993, frozen food was still merely one manufacturing division of the parent, with its investment and staffing subordinated to the logic of milling. Putting it into a separate company opened a way to measure the economics of labour-intensive manufacturing on its own. The Takasaki plant was transferred across, while the new Isesaki plant was built by the parent and leased to the subsidiary — a posture in which the business is separated while the funding burden is carried by the parent.

Yet it took twenty-five years for the separated business to return to the parent. Frozen food, described as a full-scale entry in 1996, reaches 18% of revenue only as a target for 2030 — fifty-seven years counting from the cream croquettes. As the company itself admits, an image of cheapness still clings to the category and price negotiations are difficult. This is not a business that grew quickly. What shows this company’s use of time is precisely that, in the year it read flour demand as heading for a ceiling, it prepared the receiving vessel first and then waited for the business to grow.