Company history

Suntory Beverage & Food traces its roots to February 1899, when Torii Shinjiro opened Torii Shoten in Osaka’s Nishi ward, importing wine, Western spirits and soft drinks at a time when foreign liquor was still a thin market in Meiji Japan. Torii soon moved from trading to making — the domestic Akadama port wine in 1907 — and incorporated the shop as Kotobukiya in December 1921. The soft-drink line was there almost from the start: a second business run beside the wine and spirits, never the headline but never dropped.

Kotobukiya put its drinks business on a proper footing in 1932 and in 1937 launched San Cider, billed as Japan’s first cider, building a pre-war name as a maker of carbonated drinks. The 1929 whisky christened “Suntory” became the group’s signature and, in time, its name — but soft drinks stayed the steady second pillar beside it. Through wartime sugar rationing the line was squeezed, then rebounded in the 1950s on cider and fruit nectar as the post-war market recovered. Torii ran this two-track business — spirits for profit, soft drinks for reach — until his death in 1962 at the age of seventy-eight. This is the ancestry the company still claims: not yet a firm of its own, but a distinct beverage business carried inside a spirits house.

In 1963 Kotobukiya renamed itself Suntory, after its signature whisky, and pushed from Osaka into Tokyo. Through the high-growth decades the soft-drink line sat quietly as a second- or third-tier segment behind whisky and, from 1963, beer — but it was here that Suntory learned to create categories rather than chase them: Suntory Oolong Tea (1981), then Suntory Tennensui bottled water (1990) and BOSS canned coffee (1992), each opening a mass market in Japan, with Iyemon green tea to follow in 2004.

From 1990 the drinks business also began to reach abroad and to widen its shelf. Suntory bought into Singapore’s Cerebos Pacific in 1990, gaining a Southeast-Asian foothold in coffee and health foods; in 1997 it took the Japan master-franchise for Pepsi, entering the cola war against Coca-Cola head-on, and set up the Pepsi Bottling Ventures joint venture in 1999.

By the 2000s the soft-drink arm had outgrown its place inside a conglomerate that spanned spirits, beer, health food, restaurants and overseas ventures. Running its own capital allocation and, above all, financing serious overseas M&A required something the segment did not have: a dedicated company with its own balance sheet and standing in the capital markets. That need — argued through the decade — set up the 2009 carve-out.

In 2009 Suntory reorganized. It created Suntory Foods — today Suntory Beverage & Food — in January as the vehicle for the drinks-and-food business, converted the group into a holding company, Suntory Holdings, in February, and in April hived the beverage operations down into the new company as a standalone operating business. For the first time the soft-drink arm had a corporate form of its own.

It used that form at once to buy scale. In November 2009 Suntory Holdings acquired France’s Orangina Schweppes — the Schweppes mixers and the Orangina soft drink — for about €3 billion, its decisive leap into Europe; Frucor in the Pacific had come earlier the same year. The overseas subsidiaries were gathered under the beverage company in 2011, and in July 2013 it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section while the parent stayed private — a parent-child listing that raised acquisition capital without loosening Suntory’s grip.

The buying continued: in 2014 the group took Lucozade and Ribena from GlaxoSmithKline for about £1.35 billion, planting a flag in Britain. In five years a domestic beverage line had become a four-region group — Japan, Asia, Europe and the Americas — assembled almost entirely by acquisition.

With the overseas map drawn, the focus turned to the home channel and to scale. In 2015 the company bought Japan Beverage, one of the country’s largest vending-machine operators, from the JT group — vending being where a large share of Japanese soft-drink sales is won, and where network size feeds directly into revenue. By the late 2010s the four-region structure — Japan, Asia, Europe, the Americas and Oceania — was earning steadily on both sides of the world, placing the group third among global soft-drink makers behind Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

The 2020 pandemic dented vending and food-service sales, but at-home demand cushioned the blow and revenue recovered fast — past ¥1.4 trillion in 2022 and on toward record profits. In 2022 the group folded its vending businesses into a single Suntory Beverage Solution, completing that integration in 2024, and by fiscal 2025 revenue had crossed $11.4B (¥1.7tn).

The company that grew by buying is now also pruning — exiting Nigeria’s drinks business and Oceania fresh coffee, and consolidating its acquired vending arms at home. In 2026 it takes a new corporate name emphasising food alongside drinks: the “& Food” marks a widening beyond soft drinks into the health-food and functional lines — Cerebos, BRAND’S — it had gathered across Southeast Asia. Whether a four-region group built by acquisition can hold third place, on the thin margins of the drinks trade, against Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Keurig Dr Pepper and Nestlé, is the question of its next decade.