Making overseas Japanese-food distribution the growth engine (2017)

From a company that makes liquor to a company that carries Japanese food

At the core of this shift is that a company which made and sold liquor moved its mainstay to distributing Japanese food itself to the world. While domestic sake, shochu and mirin struggled in a mature market, abroad the spread of Japanese food was lifting the wholesalers who work behind the scenes. Rather than growing its own brands overseas, Takara Holdings bought up the distribution networks that deliver Japanese ingredients locally, and with the 2017 spin-off bundled them into an independent holding company. It can be read as the process by which a company that makes things strengthened the character of a company that carries and delivers them.

That said, scale as a distribution business comes with a different placement of risk than brewing. How to make wholesalers bought in various countries mesh as a single group, and how to absorb the swings of restaurant markets, tariffs and food regulation, remain unanswered questions at the time of writing. That overseas now earns the majority of revenue also means a structure in which the company’s fortunes are governed by overseas restaurant demand. Whether the image chosen by an old house of Fushimi — “a company that sells Japanese food” — becomes a stable pillar over the next hundred years depends on how skilfully the integration is done.