From one nutritional sweet to ice cream, chocolate, gum and curry (1960)

Were widening and narrowing two faces of the same principle?

The expansion of these years is better read not as growth chasing a growing market but as a test of how far the founding principle — service to society through nutrition — could be carried. Because the first choice had been to make food for the healthy rather than medicine for the sick, curry and milk, which lie outside confectionery, could be placed inside the same reasoning. Put the other way: what decided the product range was neither market research nor competitive analysis but a single yardstick the founder held. That consistency was a strength, and it was also what made the expansion hard to brake.

And indeed the items lined up in four years came back as a financial burden, surfacing in the mid-1960s as swelling receivables and borrowings. Glico then set about keeping only what sold among the things it had added. What distinguishes this short round trip between widening and narrowing is that the criterion was not the number of items but which products the company could build up with its own machinery and its own advertising. That a company calling itself a total foods maker remained in substance one that concentrated its resources on a few products sits a little apart from the picture the word “diversification” suggests.