Company history

Kagome began with a failure. In 1899 Kanie Ichitaro, farming in the Chita district of Aichi, acted on advice an officer had given him during military service — that growing rice and barley alone would no longer do, and that he should try Western vegetables — and planted onions, cabbage and tomatoes. The tomatoes germinated that same year and then sat unwanted: fresh tomatoes had no place in the Japanese kitchen, and a grower could do little with them but throw them away. Rather than give up the crop, Kanie turned it into something that would keep and travel. In 1903 he succeeded in making tomato sauce — today's tomato purée, and the first processed tomato product made in Japan. Ketchup and Worcester sauce followed in 1908.

Corporate form came slowly: a limited partnership, Aichi Tomato Sauce Manufacturing, in December 1914; the hexagonal basket-weave Kagome mark registered as a trademark in April 1917; the Ueno plant in 1919; and in April 1923 a joint-stock company, Aichi Tomato Manufacturing. Tomato juice arrived in August 1933, completing the three families of product — purée, ketchup, juice — that would carry the company for the rest of the century. The founder's motto was 和風協力: work in harmony, work together.

What distinguished Kagome, though, was not the products but what sat behind them. From 1916 Kanie contracted with farm bodies in Aichi to grow processing tomatoes to order — acreage, variety and price agreed each year, the whole crop bought at the agreed price, cultivation supervised by Kagome itself. It secured raw material bred for the cannery at a predictable cost, and it has run without a break since. In August 1949, on its fiftieth anniversary, the firm absorbed four affiliates into a single company, Aichi Tomato Co., Ltd., capitalised at $41,667 (¥15m) and headquartered in Nagoya, with sales offices opened in Tokyo and Osaka. As Japanese cooking turned Western through the 1950s the contract acreage spread out of Aichi — Nagano in 1952, Tochigi in 1961, Ibaraki in 1962 — each major growing region getting a plant of its own. Sales reached $4.1M (¥1bn) in 1955, and in 1962 Kanie Ichitaro handed the company to his eldest son.

In 1960 the Japanese government committed to liberalising inbound capital, and the arrival of the American food giants stopped being hypothetical. Del Monte, sizing up the market, approached Kagome through Mitsui & Co. with a proposal to set up a joint venture. Kanie Ichitaro turned it down. His reasoning was blunt: the two firms made exactly the same things, so there was nothing in it for Kagome, and in a contest fought inside Japan he was confident he would not lose. Behind that confidence stood the contract farms — Kagome had been organising the domestic processing-tomato crop since 1916 — and a brand that had already made “tomatoes mean Kagome” a commonplace.

Rebuffed, Del Monte allied with Kikkoman and Mitsui to form Nihon Calpak in 1963 and sold ketchup through their channels; Heinz entered through a venture with the fishing company Nichiro. Kagome faced two foreign consortia at once, and in April 1963 renamed itself Kagome Co., Ltd. so that the company and the brand would carry one name. Both consortia lost. A decade after liberalisation, in 1972, Kagome still held 82% of ketchup and 64% of tomato juice, and the reason most often given was the raw material: the contract system had tied up 74% of Japan's processing-tomato acreage, and the newcomers, obliged to buy at home, had nowhere else to go.

Domestic strength bought the listing — the Nagoya exchange's second section in November 1976, its first section in September 1978, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange first section that November — and in the year to March 1978 Kagome led every category it sold into, from ketchup at 73.3% to vegetable juice at 23.4%. Yet the same domestic base was the exposure. A five-year “Sky Plan” from 1983 cut the domestic share of raw material from nearly 80% to 30% by 1988, replacing it with paste contracted from Turkey and Chile and from the Taiwanese joint venture Kagome had set up in 1967. Events confirmed the reading: in February 1988 Japan accepted a GATT recommendation to liberalise ten farm categories, ketchup, tomato juice and tomato sauce among them, and American processing tomatoes cost about ¥10 a kilo against ¥50 at home. That June Kagome announced a Californian subsidiary and a plant of its own — and drew furious protest from the roughly 3,700 Japanese farms still under contract to it.

The Sky Plan multiplied products as well as suppliers: 300–400 items at the start, about 1,000 five years later, with sales stalled around ¥110bn and selling costs eating the margin. Beverages, by then the largest of the four product groups, lost money for roughly a decade, and a redesigned ketchup bottle launched in 1988 to meet Heinz was rejected by shoppers, dragging down the one product that had never faltered. Restructuring from 1991 cut the range to about 600 items; the rebates paid to large wholesalers were abolished in 1993 in favour of calling on retailers directly; and a logistics system built with IBM Japan broke the habit of over-forecasting and over-producing, taking average inventory down by about 20%. A new pressing method lifted carrot juice roughly tenfold in 1992, operating profit doubled to ¥4bn in the year to March 1993, and Yasai Seikatsu 100 launched in 1995.

In 1996, in its ninety-seventh year, Kagome appointed its first president from outside the founding family. Ito took over a company whose sales had been flat for a decade and chose, against the fashion for “selection and concentration,” to put growth ahead of profit. His predecessor had already set the direction that mattered more: a return to the origin, agriculture. In 1998 Kagome formed a farming company with growers in Ibaraki and began raising fresh table tomatoes itself in computer-controlled greenhouses — taking back the one step, cultivation, that it had always left to others. In the same year it wrote off the American venture begun in 1988, liquidating its US sales and manufacturing subsidiaries against a $32.9M (¥4bn) extraordinary loss and restarting on the narrower ground of vegetable-based seasonings.

Then it did something stranger. In 2000 Kagome adopted “an open company” as one of three corporate principles, and from 2001 directed the shares released by the unwinding of bank cross-holdings to individual investors, courting them with twice-yearly gifts and tasting meetings the president attended in person. The register went from about 6,000 shareholders — of whom some 120 turned up to the annual meeting — to 67,000 by the end of fiscal 2002, individuals at 39% overtaking the founding family as the largest bloc. Kioka Koji, president from October 2002, called for “a field army, not a besieged castle,” gathering product ideas from every employee over the intranet and setting a target of 20% of sales from new products. In 2007 Asahi Breweries took 10% through a third-party allotment and became the largest shareholder.

The greenhouses were the long bill. Four subsidiary farms — in Hiroshima, Fukushima, Wakayama and Fukuoka — all lost money, and roughly ¥10bn went into them. What finally worked was less industrial than the “vegetable factory” language had suggested: production data from eleven company farms pooled weekly, a French agronomist touring the sites every two months, microbial pesticides and plant vaccines added to the nutrient solution, and growers checking each plant against what it had looked like the day before. The fresh-vegetable segment turned an operating profit of ¥800m in the year to March 2013 — fourteen years after entry.

From 2014 Terada Naoyuki set the long-term aim as “from a tomato company to a vegetable company,” and the accounts moved to IFRS for the year to December 2015. The clearest demonstration came in 2016, when Kagome added a functional claim about blood cholesterol to Kagome Tomato Juice — a product on sale since 1933 — and shipped 73% more of it without altering the contents or the price, on the strength of more than 1,300 papers reviewed on the lycopene in tomatoes. Consolidated operating profit rose from ¥4.3bn in the year to December 2014 to ¥12.2bn in 2018.

The last turn led back to the field, on another continent. Yamaguchi Satoshi, president from 2020 and the first with a technical background, judged that drought and tightening restrictions on irrigation had capped what Japanese acreage could deliver, and that the chronic overcapacity in Californian first-stage processing had cleared as rivals withdrew. In January 2024 Kagome raised its stake in Ingomar Packing, a leading Californian processor of tomatoes, enough to consolidate it. International sales doubled to $854.8M (¥130bn) that year and consolidated revenue reached ¥306.9bn. Revenue fell back in 2025, and from January 2026 the presidency passed to Okutani Harunobu, who had led the Ingomar integration — a plain signal about where growth is now expected to come from. At the close of 2025 the register held 241,577 shareholders, individuals and others owning 63% of the stock: the company that once refused a foreign partner in order to keep its own ground now grows much of its crop in California and is owned by the people who drink its juice.