Refusing Del Monte: contract farming and the independent line (1960)

Whose ground the fight is fought on

At the core of the refusal one can see a conviction about the company's own foundations. Taking in foreign capital and a global brand would have brought the advertising muscle to widen the market and a foothold abroad. Kanie Ichitaro chose instead the consistency of holding the whole chain himself, from contracted raw material through to domestic distribution. It was a choice that put the question of whose ground the fight would be fought on ahead of the logic of efficiency and scale, and the character of the decision shows in how early he let the option of allying with a foreign partner go.

That said, the strength staked on domestic raw material and independence carried its own inversion. A structure that depended deeply on Japanese tomatoes became, as farm imports were liberalised in the 1980s, the burden of expensive domestic material in a competition fought on price. The ground held alone leads on to the later return to agriculture and to a management built around the brand, while also being what international competition forced the company to reconsider. The independent line chosen by refusing the alliance is at once the source of Kagome's individuality and the starting point of its later problems — that is the reach of this decision.