Company history

Fuji Oil was incorporated in October 1950 with $8,333 (¥3m) of capital supplied entirely by Itochu, which wanted an operating company for the oils and fats it traded, and it bought the Osaka mill of Fuji Sanshi to get into the business. Japan’s edible oil industry was already occupied — Nisshin, Honen, NOF, Yoshihara, all prewar firms. Fuji Oil was the last entrant, with no scale and no brand, and its attempt to sell cooking oil against them failed even with advertising behind it.

What that failure left was the ground the majors did not want: tropical fats that set at room temperature, and the technique of separating fats by melting point. In February 1951 the company started pressing copra and became the first in Japan to succeed with combined pressing and solvent extraction; in January 1954 it ran Japan’s first serious palm-kernel crushing; and in September 1955 a solvent fractionation unit at the Osaka works began producing Japan’s first hard butter, sold as Melano Butter. Three national firsts in five years, none of them in a market anyone was contesting.

Hard butter is a cocoa butter equivalent — a vegetable fat that stands in for imported cocoa butter in chocolate — and by refining it from palm and palm-kernel oil Fuji Oil created a market of its own supplying confectioners, starting with the Kansai makers served from the Kobe plant opened in August 1955. The same fractionation skill then travelled upward: chocolate for Western-style confectionery from 1963, vegetable cream from 1967 as a plant-based answer to dairy cream, and in December 1967 isolated soy protein, used to improve the texture of processed meats. Vegetable fat and vegetable protein — the two axes it still runs on — were both in place by the end of the 1960s.

In 1968 the company bought some 192,000 square metres in the Izumisano food industrial complex; the Hannan plant opened in 1969, was extended in 1971, and the original Osaka works was closed and moved into it. That land was what made scale possible in both fats and soy protein. The listing followed the growth — Osaka First Section in 1973, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section in October 1978, seventeen years after the initial Osaka Second Section listing. Twenty-eight years after entering last, Fuji Oil was a national listed oil maker built on three proprietary lines.

President Nishimura Seitaro put the method plainly in 1981: the root of fats processing is fractionation — take a blended oil apart, pull out the fraction with a distinct character, and build a product on that character. Chocolate fats, vegetable cream, fats for vegetable cheese all came from the same technique, and it was portable. Fuji Oil Singapore, established in October 1981, was the first move abroad; Palmaju Edible Oil in Malaysia followed in 1986, putting refining at the source of palm oil, then US subsidiaries in 1987 and, in February 1992, a Belgian company that became Fuji Oil Europe. In eleven years a domestic miller became a multinational on three continents.

China came in 1995 with a Zhangjiagang subsidiary, then soy protein in Tianjin in 2004, Thailand in 2010 and an Asian regional headquarters in Singapore in 2012. At home the Tsukuba R&D centre opened in 1990 and four plants — Hannan, Kanto, Rinku and Chiba — carried domestic capacity, with an industrial chocolate line added at Kanto in 2001. In July 2014 the head office moved to Izumisano, next to the Hannan works.

Then the structure changed. In June 2015 Fuji Oil bought Harald, Brazil’s leading industrial chocolate maker, and in October 2015 it converted itself into a pure holding company, Fuji Oil Holdings, spinning the operating business into a new Fuji Oil Co., Ltd. Authority went to regional headquarters, and the pace of deals rose accordingly: a Malaysian chocolate company in 2016, plants in China, a palm supply-chain joint venture in Malaysia in 2017, a New Orleans company and an Australian acquisition in 2018.

The largest came in January 2019, when Fuji Oil acquired Blommer Chocolate, the biggest industrial chocolate maker in North America, at an enterprise value of about $777.9M (¥85bn) — the largest deal in its history. It bought a customer base, a third pillar to stand beside fats and soy protein, and third place in industrial chocolate worldwide. Acquisition costs cut reported profit in the year to March 2019, and management framed the charge as the price of building the pillar.

Under Sakai Mikio, president from April 2021, the mid-term plan “Reborn 2024” named plant-based food the third business alongside vegetable fats and industrial chocolate, and set the company explicitly against its own habit of chasing volume: differentiation through sustainability and added value, quality over quantity. The portfolio was pruned as well as extended — a US joint venture and the purchase of Oilseeds International in 2022, but also the disposal of the New Orleans fixed assets and the Chinese soy protein business. Consolidated sales rose from ¥414.7 billion in the year to March 2020 to ¥564.0 billion four years later, though currency, raw material costs and Blommer’s deteriorating margins pulled results in different directions.

In March 2024 the company announced a five-year restructuring of Blommer including the closure of its Chicago plant. The equipment it had bought came from a company founded in 1939, and its age came with it; when cocoa bean prices surged, that scale converted directly into earnings volatility. Sales reached a record ¥671.2 billion in the year to March 2025, with the American chocolate business still unfixed.

In April 2025 Fuji Oil absorbed its own operating subsidiary and reverted to an operating holding company, taking back the name Fuji Oil Co., Ltd. — ending the pure holding structure after roughly nine and a half years. Omori Tatsuji became CEO the same month, arguing for a manufacturer’s perspective, problem-solving built on technology, and one company running fats, industrial chocolate and soy protein across Japan, the Americas and Southeast Asia without a boundary between headquarters and the floor. That September he came back to where the company started: the motto that you cannot survive doing what everyone else does still, he said, runs in the staff as DNA.