Company history

Nakashima Toichiro worked for a cannery before the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce sent him abroad in 1912 as an overseas trainee. Three years in Britain and the United States gave him two products — mayonnaise and orange marmalade — and one idea: that the poor physical condition of Japanese people could be improved through food. Back home he opened a canned-goods business in 1918 and, in 1919, a manufacturer, Shokuhin Kogyo, in Nakano, Tokyo.

In 1925 that company made and sold Japan’s first domestic mayonnaise. It was built on egg yolk rather than the whole egg used in Europe and America — a deliberately different, more nutritious formulation — and carried the name of the Kewpie doll, a popular character of the day. In a country only beginning to eat Western food it took decades to find its market, but emulsification and canning became the technical base from which jam, pasta sauces and, much later, nursing-care foods would come.

From the start, making and selling were separate companies: Shokuhin Kogyo manufactured, and Nakashima’s own trading house, Nakashima To Shoten, sold. With an unfamiliar product to place in Japanese kitchens, the division made sense — the trading house carried the burden of opening channels and holding customers, leaving the factory free to concentrate on production and quality. It lasted until 1972. The other pillar, jam, began in 1932 with Kidoen in Tadanoumi, Hiroshima, wholly funded by Nakashima; its brand name Aohata — “blue flag” — came from the plain blue colours he had seen Cambridge and Oxford fly at the Boat Race.

Household mayonnaise had been Kewpie’s alone. Ajinomoto entered in 1968 and Kao in 2002, and although Kewpie held roughly 70% of the retail market, the condiment market itself had matured: the core business, dressings included, missed its medium-term plan three years running. A strong main product was no longer a place to stand, and growth had to be found outside the home ground while the home ground was defended — the two-front problem that defined the company through these years.

The answer lay in two adjacencies. Commercial egg products — rolled omelette, boiled egg — and prepared foods and salads for convenience stores were growing as more households had two earners or one member, and nakashoku, food bought ready to eat at home, took share. That business is the opposite of a condiment: small volumes of many items, changing almost daily, demanding development that anticipates the customer and the speed to deliver it. Kewpie connected the egg expertise built for mayonnaise, and the national sales network it had owned since 1972, to that demand.

In February 2004 Suzuki Yutaka, eleven years younger than his predecessor, became president. A career salesman who had joined in 1973 and had helped draft the new medium-term plan from 2002, he set out to replace the complacency of a mature market with speed. His signature push was to use the egg completely: Kewpie consumes about 230,000 tonnes of eggs a year, close to 9% of Japanese production, and a dedicated Egg R&D centre worked on turning the shells and shell membranes into materials — including functional stockings woven with powdered membrane. The other front was China, entered in 1993, where Kewpie held 46% of the household mayonnaise market and set up a production and sales base in Hangzhou with Mitsubishi Corporation and others in 2002.

Overseas expansion went from points to an area: Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore in succession, then Poland in 2016 for European production and sales. At home, the Sengawa Kewport opened in 2013 on the site of the old Sengawa plant, concentrating research and group office functions. Consolidated sales reached a then-record ¥531.1bn in FY2020, and the company was no longer standing on mayonnaise alone.

What changed more was the perimeter. In 2014 Kewpie transferred its bread-spread sales business to Aohata and made that company — the jam business it had founded in 1932 — a consolidated subsidiary. In 2021 it sold a slice of K.R.S. Corporation, the logistics company born in 1966 as its own warehouse division, and moved it and fourteen subsidiaries out of consolidation and into the equity method: 2% of the shares changed hands, and ¥124.1bn of consolidated sales and an entire reporting segment disappeared with them. The North American egg business was sold outright. Assets were now judged by profitability and strategic fit rather than kept because they had always been there.

The 2019 Group 2030 Vision and its medium-term plans made that explicit — domestic operations regrouped into retail and commercial, a move to the TSE Prime Market in 2022, buybacks and higher dividends, and a shift in the yardstick from scale to profit and capital efficiency. The 2025–2028 plan set domestic structural reform and faster global expansion side by side, consolidating six production companies into a more efficient supply chain. In the same year Aohata was taken fully in-house by share exchange, bringing the 1932 jam venture wholly inside the group at last. FY2025 sales were ¥513.4bn with net profit of ¥30.5bn.