Company history

Morinaga Milk did not begin as a dairy company. It began as a purchasing problem. Morinaga Seika, the confectioner built by Morinaga Taichiro, depended on imported condensed milk for its sweets and disliked being at the mercy of exchange rates and shipping delays; in September 1917 it bought the Aikoku condensery in Chiba and set up Nihon Rennyu with capital of ¥300,000, its first customer being its own candy plants. Making the raw material itself was what got the business standing, and from that base the line widened fast: small-can Morinaga Milk in 1919, and at the Nishikida plant in Shizuoka at the end of 1920 the first machine-made powdered milk in Japan, sold from November 1921 as Morinaga Dry Milk.

For the next quarter-century the dairy arm was absorbed and spun out again as the parent’s finances dictated. Merged into Morinaga Seika in July 1920 as its livestock division, it was cut loose again in September 1927 — capital expansion and world depression had squeezed the confectioner — as Morinaga Rennyu, capitalised at ¥1.5 million with Morinaga Taichiro as president and six plants inherited from the parent. Independence broadened the catalogue beyond cans: bottled milk from the Hiratsuka plant in 1929, Morinaga Cheese in 1933, Morinaga Yoghurt in 1937, a full dairy range assembled before the war, with modern equipment imported from Switzerland, Britain and the Netherlands from 1933.

Wartime control then dismantled that independence. In 1940 Morinaga transferred every Hokkaido plant, milk-collection right and sales right to the state-sponsored Hokkaido Kono Kosha, and its Tokyo city-milk business to Tokyo Nyugyo — a severe loss when seven-tenths of its output was in Hokkaido, and one accepted only on president Matsuzaki Hanzaburo’s judgment after a direct approach from the Hokkaido governor. Renamed Morinaga Milk Industry in May 1941, the company was merged back into Morinaga Seika in October 1942 and reduced once more to a production division.

The third and final separation came on 13 April 1949, when Morinaga recovered the Meguro plant from Tokyo Nyugyo and re-established Morinaga Milk Industry with capital of $27,778 (¥10m) under Matsuzaki Hanzaburo. Capital went to ¥70 million that September, the parent’s dairy division was taken over whole that October, and on 1 September 1954 the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with capital of $1.3M (¥465m), 24 plants and 1,442 employees. Powdered milk was more than 42% of production value — the trade called it “Morinaga the dry milk company” — and its infant formula was about half of everything made in Japan. Sales reached $12.5M (¥5bn) in the year to March 1955, first in the industry in both revenue and profit.

That leadership is what made the summer of 1955 a national catastrophe. At the Tokushima plant a milk stabiliser, disodium phosphate, had been in use since 1950 and in full use since 1953 — measured by eye, never tested on arrival. The lot delivered in April 1955 carried that label but was in fact an arsenic-bearing waste from Nippon Light Metal’s aluminium production, routed to the plant through several intermediaries; Shizuoka prefecture had asked the state ten months earlier whether the substance counted as a poison and had not waited for the answer. On 24 August 1955 Okayama prefecture named Tokushima-made infant formula as the cause. By the health ministry’s February 1956 tally, 131 were dead and 12,159 poisoned; the April lot held 4.2–6.3% arsenic against a harmful threshold of 0.3%.

Morinaga signed a blank mandate to the health ministry, and a five-man committee of lawyers and doctors set compensation by analogy to Japan’s recent disasters. Regulation moved faster than the company: the milk ordinance was amended at once, the Food Sanitation Act overhauled in 1957, an official compendium of food additives published from 1960. Rebuilding fell to Ono Isamu, who restarted the halted plant programme on land bought from the bankrupt Nippon Kentetsu and opened the 23,500-tsubo Tokyo plant in Katsushika in 1957 — larger than anything in the industry, and the first to put city milk and dairy products on one site. He recruited Dr. Maeno Masahisa from Hokkaido University to run research, then resigned as executive vice-president in spring 1956 to mark responsibility. From 1957 the Tokyo plant ran the first mass-production system in Japanese dairy, a concentration that industry and ministries alike had thought impossible in a country whose raw milk came from scattered regions.

The 1960s were built in concrete. Creap, a powdered creamer reverse-engineered by an engineer from a note on cream-drying in an American trade journal and patented in 1951 to keep rivals out, went on sale in April 1961; a central research laboratory opened in 1964; and in February 1966 the Tama plant started the most advanced automated city-milk line in the world, with capacity equal to three million 180cc bottles a day and per-worker throughput of 10,000–20,000 bottles against an industry average of 2,000 and Morinaga’s own 3,000. Sales rose to $89.2M (¥32bn) in the year to September 1964 and approached ¥90 billion by the fiftieth anniversary in 1967, with twelve city-milk and twelve dairy plants — but margins ran at about 2%. Scale was arriving without profit.

Meanwhile the 1955 case had gone quiet: the victims’ league had been dissolved on the promise of nationwide check-ups, and the press had moved on. On 18 October 1969 Professor Maruyama Hiroshi’s team reported A Visit in the Fourteenth Year to the public health society, describing 68 survivors living with varied disabilities. Ono went to the ministry the next day and later said he regretted fourteen years of merely waiting for those who asked to be examined. Talks with the victims’ association deadlocked over permanent measures — an open-ended liability that could threaten the company’s existence — until the paediatric society’s special committee formally recognised the sequelae in May 1973 and named the syndrome. The ministry convened three-party talks that September; by the end of 1973 Morinaga accepted responsibility and all obligations of relief, and in April 1974 the Hikari Association was founded on the company’s full funding, the pending civil suits withdrawn on that condition. Morinaga paid it about $1.2M (¥350m) in the first year and $3.5M (¥800m) by 1980; victims numbered some 13,000 by 2010, about 1,100 of them dead.

The other answer to thin margins was to leave the field where scale decided. Parent sales climbed from ¥118.7 billion in the year to March 1971 to ¥194.9 billion five years later while ordinary profit stayed under ¥2.5 billion and fell to ¥400 million in the year to March 1974 — proof that matching Meiji and Snow Brand product for product could not pay. Morinaga had isolated a human-derived strain, BB536, from an infant’s gut in 1969 and applied bifidobacteria to a dairy product for the first time in Japan in 1971; in June 1977 it launched Morinaga Bifidus, opening a category defined by a bacterium rather than by volume. The same research bet paid off again in June 1993, when low-phosphorus milk L.P.K became the first product in Japan approved as a Food for Specified Health Uses — twenty-four years from the strain to the state’s endorsement.

Domestic milk consumption was falling about 3% a year, and the staples had to be defended on ground that paid badly. Morinaga launched Morinaga no Oishii Gyunyu in Kansai in September 2003 against Meiji’s established rival brand, expecting ¥2 billion in that region alone; its flagship Aloe Yoghurt, worth ¥27.2 billion in 2002, was rescued from two hard years by repackaging it as a pouch for convenience stores in 2005; and concentrating ice cream behind three brands — pino, PARM and MOW — returned Morinaga to market leadership in the year to March 2007 for the first time in seventeen years. Behind the shelves the structure was consolidated: nine sales subsidiaries folded into one in 2005, the Kobe plant in 2006, a cheese building at Betsukai in 2008 built with the other majors after 900 tonnes of Hokkaido raw milk were dumped in 2006. In 2009 the Snow Brand merger created a group of ¥525 billion, closing on Morinaga’s second place.

What carried the company beyond liquid milk was research it already owned. The medical-nutrition arm founded in 1978, renamed Clinico in 1997, built a business on liquid diets: CZ-Hi in 2001 used soy as a copper source for the trace-mineral deficiencies of long-stay patients, and the world’s first aseptically filled bag-type liquid diet followed; about 250 staff across 43 offices grew it roughly 10% a year to some ¥28 billion by FY2010. After the March 2011 earthquake Clinico delivered around 60,000 meals to 150 hospitals and care homes, and that April CZ-Hi became the first liquid diet certified as a food for special dietary uses. Abroad the same logic applied — Germany’s MILEI GmbH taken to full ownership in 2012, bacterial-powder production started at Fukui in 2014, a Singapore base in 2015, the NutriCo Morinaga joint venture in Pakistan in 2017 — as the company reached its centenary in September 2017.

Under Onuki Yoichi, president from June 2021, that drift abroad became a concentrated programme. Elovi Vietnam was consolidated in January 2021 and NutriCo Morinaga in January 2023, both infant formula in growing populations; then in February 2023 the US subsidiary acquired Turtle Island Foods, owner of the Tofurky brand, for about $11.6M (¥2bn) — plant-based food, the furthest bet from milk, resting on forty years of selling tofu in America. Roughly ¥10 billion went into three overseas deals in 2023, lifting the overseas revenue share from 8.7% to 11.3% and making overseas operations more than 40% of group operating profit. Consolidated sales reached ¥561.2 billion in the year to March 2025 with an operating margin near 5%, against about 1% a decade earlier, though ¥25.8 billion of extraordinary losses cut net income to ¥5.4 billion. In November 2025 Onuki acknowledged that the American plant-based business was struggling and that plants were being consolidated. The obligation from 1955 runs alongside all of it: when the Tokushima plant closed in 2011 the company said the relief programme would not change, and the Hikari Association has continued to pay victims about ¥70,000 a month.