Taking over the sales network and ending 50 years of separate making and selling (1972)

What it means to become a company that owns its channel

The character of this decision was neither a reshuffling of capital nor the building of a plant, but a change in where the company placed the surface at which it touched the outside world. Leaving sales to Nakashima To Shoten was rational in an era when nobody knew whether a Western condiment would sell, and it was in fact the trading house’s effort that carried mayonnaise into Japanese homes. But in that form, information about what was happening at the point of sale necessarily passed through another company before it reached the manufacturer. For a company that had become public with its 1970 listing, that one beat of delay — and the difficulty of explaining it — weighed heavily.

That what it took over was neither a factory nor a trademark but a list of customers is the implication of this decision. Receiving relationships the trading house had built over half a century and redistributing them across twenty sales offices was work whose results took time to appear in the numbers. The form in which it bore fruit, it seems, was the way the company worked from the late 1990s, with a single salesperson going after a restaurant chain’s new menu item through repeated coordination inside and outside the company. Drawing the question of who faces the customer back into the company itself created the precondition for everything it later built in prepared and food-service business.