Founded on Itochu capital with the purchase of the Fuji Sanshi Osaka mill (1950)

On choosing a field from a position of weakness

What this founding settled can be seen as less the creation of a company than the question of where not to fight. The mainstream of Japanese oil milling — tempura oil — could not be entered even with money spent on advertising. What remained after that failure was the territory nobody then regarded as the main battleground: southern fats that solidify, and the technique of separating those fats by differences in melting point. The conditions of being last and small appear, in the event, to have forced the choice of a business mix that did not overlap with the majors. That it began not from a strong company’s rational diversification but from a process of elimination in a weak position is what marks the character of this judgement.

That said, it did not simply stay in the field elimination had chosen. The policy of extending the technique gained in fractionation vertically — from chocolate fats to vegetable cream to soy protein — was supported by a way of reading margins characteristic of a trading-house-funded firm: absorb raw-material price swings on the side nearer the finished product. This 1950s idea of raising the degree of processing until you reach ground where prices are stable reappears in the later overseas acquisitions in industrial chocolate and in the investment in plant-based food. That the phrase “don’t imitate anyone” still comes from the mouth of a president seventy-five years later shows the weight of this first choice.