Company history

The company began with something being thrown away. In the spring of 1919 Ezaki Riichi, a druggist’s son from Saga running his father’s medicine trade, watched oysters being boiled on the banks of the Chikugo River and remembered a pharmaceutical journal’s note that oysters are rich in glycogen. He carried off two bottles of the discarded broth, had Kyushu Imperial University analyse the reduction, and was told it ran 36–43% glycogen with iron besides. Sankyo was already selling glycogen as a tablet. Ezaki reasoned the other way: a medicine reaches only the sick, while a confection reaches healthy children every day — so the nutrient should ride in a sweet. In April 1921, aged forty-one, he moved his family to Osaka and started on 60,000 yen of capital, against Morinaga’s 15 million and Meiji’s 7.5 million.

The product was designed backwards from its marketing. The running-man mark was chosen by schoolchildren from five candidates pinned up in a corridor; the slogan 一粒三百メートル — “300 metres in one grain” — was set at 300 because 500 sounded like a boast and 100 like nothing, and each grain was then built to carry exactly that much energy for a 40kg runner. The box was red where the trade’s convention, set by Morinaga, was yellow. Ezaki pushed his unknown sweet into Osaka’s Mitsukoshi department store on 11 February 1922, a date the company still keeps as its founding day, and the next two and a half years consumed cash — a shortfall of 46 yen on a cheque sent him to a moneylender at 15 sen a day, and he told his fourteen live-in clerks to buy nothing new but underwear and clogs for three years. Free two-grain sample sachets, coupons and an honesty-box vending machine borrowed from shrine fortune slips turned it profitable in the autumn of 1924.

What followed was a pattern of near-death and improvisation. A mountain of returns in 1925 left debts of 62,000 yen — 2,000 yen less than the sum that liquidated a rival; the 1927 banking panic took down Omi Bank and cut the company’s cash to 260 yen, saved by a branch manager at Dai-Ichi who opened an account on the spot. Toys packed with the caramel from the late 1920s, and a second founding in Bisco (1933) — a yeast biscuit whose cream sandwich required a fat process the industry had called impossible. Then the war took it all: plants converted to aircraft work in 1944, and both the Tokyo and Osaka works burned in 1945. Standing in the ashes, Ezaki told his staff the largest capital that had survived was the Glico signboard, and sold his 1937 Buick for 175,000 yen to buy starch syrup.

Listing changed the company’s reach. Osaka in 1954, Tokyo in 1961, capital climbing from 120 million yen to 2.25 billion by 1963 — and with the money came range. Ice cream in 1957, chocolate in 1958, chewing gum and curry roux in 1960, then some ten dairy ventures capitalized jointly with farmers and merged into Glico Kyodo Nyugyo in 1966. Matsushita Konosuke joined the board as an outside director at listing and stayed until his death; when Ezaki, having lost his eldest son and designated successor in 1950, spoke of shrinking the business, Matsushita told him Glico was no longer his alone but Japan’s. The logic of the expansion was never market research. Curry and milk belonged inside the company for the same reason the caramel had: they carried nutrition to healthy people.

The cost showed in the balance sheet. A line of four core products in 1958 became 149 items; between the years ended March 1960 and March 1964 sales rose 2.7× to 15.71 billion yen while receivables rose 5.2× and borrowings 6.2×, from 630 million to $10.8M (¥4bn). Pre-tax profit managed only 2.5×. In the year to March 1963 collections came in 1.5 billion yen below sales — the company was producing and shipping without reference to what the shelf actually sold. The share price drifted from 128 yen in January 1965 to 65 yen in July, near par.

At that point Ezaki Riichi, still president, reversed the machine he had built. Ship only what sells through: the divisional structure abolished, prefectural branches consolidated to seven, the line cut at a stroke to 28 items and confectionery held near thirty varieties where Meiji and Morinaga each carried over a hundred. The immediate price was a 13% fall in pre-tax profit. The payoff took a decade: from the year to March 1968 to that of March 1975 sales rose 3.4× while receivables rose only 1.6×, pre-tax profit 7.4×, and borrowings barely at all. Headcount fell 45% to 1,667 against Meiji’s 7,117 and Morinaga’s 5,268. In the half-year to September 1975, on sales of 38.8 billion yen — roughly half of Meiji’s 71.5 billion — Glico earned an ordinary profit of $14.4M (¥4bn) against Meiji’s 3.2 billion and Morinaga’s 1.6 billion, and carried 4.07 billion yen of debt against their 46.8 billion and 28.3 billion.

Having narrowed at home, Glico grew by carrying the same few products abroad. Thai Glico was formed in 1970 on 1 million baht with the Japanese side holding 48%, after staff sent from Osaka established four facts a market survey could not supply: sugar and labour each under a quarter of Japanese cost, an immature but fast-growing market, and no strong incumbent. Three plants went up near Don Mueang by 1976, the third paid for entirely out of its own cash. Sales reached 24 million baht in 1975, Pretz became as widely known as Toyota or Ajinomoto and travelled to villages on the Lao and Cambodian borders, and rivals — deterred by Thai political risk — never followed, leaving Glico a monopoly it had not had to fight for. Europe came next: a 1982 joint venture with Générale Biscuit that made Pocky under the name Mikado.

Then came the event that defines the company in Japanese memory. Ezaki Riichi died in 1980 at ninety-seven; his grandson Ezaki Katsuhisa became president in 1982. On the night of 18 March 1984 Katsuhisa was seized from his home in Nishinomiya and escaped three days later from a flood-control shed on the Yodo River. The extortionist calling himself “the Monster with 21 Faces” demanded 300 million yen, then widened the campaign to Morinaga, House Foods and Marudai — 27 crimes in all. When products were threatened with sodium cyanide in May 1984, retailers stripped them from the shelves; Glico had a tamper-evident heat-shrink wrap designed within a month and installed across its plants by August. Sales still fell a fifth in the year to March 1985, producing a 1.7 billion yen operating loss, and did not recover until 1988. No one was ever charged, and the kidnapping passed the statute of limitations in 1994.

What carried the company out was a method rather than a product: no launch unless a line could be expected to reach 2.5 billion yen a year, and no launch at all before at least three months of test selling in ten shops near the Osaka head office. Almond Crush Pocky took two years and three months from a Shizuoka trial to national rollout and reached 8.5 billion yen. Item count was held near 120 against Lotte and Morinaga’s 400. The same caution then failed in the opposite direction: Mousse Pocky, launched regionally in January 2000, sold a full year’s forecast in three weeks, ran into capacity at half of orders, and was suspended within a fortnight — the European line taking four to five months to duplicate — while Meiji, which had gone first with a rival product, simply added a third line and never ran out.

The founder’s premise — nutrition inside something people eat anyway — was restated for a modern market as functional confectionery: Pos-Ca (2003), a gum with phosphoryl oligosaccharide calcium claiming remineralization, backed by 2 billion yen of advertising and met with a suit from Lotte, which held 70% of the dental-gum market; then GABA chocolate in 2005. Abroad the company bought and partnered rather than exported: Icreo infant formula in 2001, Ezaki Glico USA in 2003, a joint venture with Haitai in Korea in 2011, Glico-Wings in Indonesia in 2013. Not all of it held. The San Francisco chocolatier TCHO, acquired in 2018 for $35.9M (¥4bn), had its entire goodwill written off within two years.

By the 2019 reporting year overseas operations, previously scattered across the confectionery, frozen and dairy segments, were disclosed as a segment of their own — and by 2025 they were the largest profit contributor of six, on sales of 90.7 billion yen, a quarter of the group. The domestic base was rebuilt around them: Glico Nyugyo absorbed in 2015, the fiscal year moved from March to December in 2019, fourteen manufacturing subsidiaries folded into a single company in 2020. In February 2022 Glico marked its centenary and moved to the Tokyo Prime market; Ezaki Etsuro succeeded Katsuhisa after his roughly forty years as president, and the segments were recast in 2023 from five product lines into six businesses.

The hundredth year also brought the two questions the company had never had to answer from outside. In January 2024 Dalton Investments filed four shareholder proposals, noting that return on equity had averaged around 5% for five years while net financial assets of 115.6 billion yen exceeded 40% of market capitalization; all four were voted down, but the motion to let the general meeting decide dividends drew 42.9% support — and a year later Glico proposed the same amendment itself. Meanwhile the ERP programme begun in 2019, its budget swelling to $243.4M (¥34bn) and its go-live more than a year late, cut over to SAP S/4HANA on 3 April 2024 and stopped chilled-goods shipments for seven months across 82 products including Pucchin Purin. Operating profit fell 7.5 billion yen to 11.1 billion for 2024, with $42.2M (¥6bn) of remediation booked as an extraordinary loss; the dairy business lost 6.4 billion. In 2025 sales set a record at 361.4 billion yen while operating profit fell again, to 8.7 billion.