A “return to agriculture”: growing fresh tomatoes in-house (1998)

From processing to farming — the point of the long way round

At the heart of this decision lies the question of where a processed-food company places itself. Kagome had long been a company that had farmers grow tomatoes, processed them in its factories and sold them. Growing fresh tomatoes itself was an attempt to take back the one part of that division of labour it had most left to others — cultivation — and a movement that pulled a business extended outward by diversification and internationalisation back to its origin in the produce. What supported an apparently roundabout return to agriculture was a conviction that the company's strength lay not in efficiency or scale but in the power to make the raw material.

The dozen and more years from entry to profitability show, though, that the conviction was not easily repaid. A business launched under the banner of an industrially controlled “vegetable factory” arrived in the end at patient growing management — picking up a leaf or a fruit and watching what had changed since the day before. Agriculture, dealing with nature, does not ripen to plan simply because capital and technology have been put into it. The years of enduring losses until demand for fresh produce turned favourable put to today's Kagome both the weight and the possibility of a food maker taking hold of the farming upstream of itself.