Company history

In May 1958 Morimura Kunio, then thirty-nine, set up Ebara Foods in the Matsumi district of Yokohama. He had run the Osaka sales office of Kinkei Foods, a seasoning maker of fruit sauces and ketchup run by his brothers, and chose to go independent in the same trade. The company began as a maker of commercial sauce and ketchup under the Kinkei brand and a contract producer of soup seasonings for instant ramen — a subcontractor in commercial seasonings, selling to restaurants and food manufacturers.

That market belonged to established firms — Bull-Dog Sauce, Kagome — and a small Yokohama maker could match neither their prices nor their volumes. When Morimura began devoting himself to the company full-time in September 1965 it was a workshop of fewer than ten people, renting rooms in a colleague’s house, with monthly sales under $2,778 (¥1m), abandoned by the banks, and carrying $11,111 (¥4m) borrowed privately at 5% a month. Sales were still only $416,667 (¥150m) in fiscal 1968: nearly a decade in, there was no way to break the incumbents’ hold on sauce and ketchup.

Morimura’s answer was not a frontal attack in an established category but entry into one that did not yet exist as a category at all. His miso ramen soup was selling into Chinese restaurants just as yakiniku grill houses were opening across the country and filling with young customers. A grill sauce would sell through butchers, so it would not collide with his own ramen-shop channel. Kagome had launched a barbecue sauce in 1962, which proved the market could exist — but grilling meat at home was not yet a Japanese habit and the product had not spread. After eating his way through dozens of grill houses, Morimura concluded that the hard part of cooking yakiniku at home was the seasoning, and that the tare was what would carry it.

Ebara launched Yakiniku no Tare in 1967. Grilling meat at home was not yet a custom, but spreading supermarkets and household refrigerators were making it possible to buy cheap raw meat and cook it at home. Kagome, first to market in 1962, put its investment into ketchup instead, so promotion of the grill-sauce category stayed limited — which handed the late entrant the chance to take the recognition the incumbent had not claimed. In April 1968 the Kinkei brand was switched to Ebara, and that July the company renamed itself Ebara Foods Industry, aligning the corporate name with the product.

The distinctive choice was where to sell. The battleground for household seasonings was the supermarket aisle, where Bull-Dog and Kagome held the shelves. Ebara concentrated instead on butchers: repeated in-store tastings, and the patient work of earning a spot beside the till in the meat section, where a shopper buying raw meat could be offered the sauce at the moment of purchase. Staff kept the campaign deliberately inconspicuous so the large makers would not notice, and named it the mole campaign — establishing the product as a fixture at the meat counter before Bull-Dog or Kagome reacted. In 1970 the company still had 34 employees and banked with a branch of the regional Bank of Yokohama. Behind the shop work, a distribution structure was built: the country split into eleven blocks, one or two wholesalers under exclusive contract in each, and from them a multi-tier chain of secondary wholesalers and retailers.

In 1970 Ebara bet the company on television. Sales that year were $1.3M (¥450m); the advertising was priced accordingly. Morimura chose Shizuoka for the first campaign — belonging to neither the Tokyo nor the Osaka cultural sphere, it made the ideal test market — then moved into the capital region through Fuji TV at the end of the year, changing the lead performer to the rakugo comedian later known as Tachibanaya Enzo. Each region got six months of concentrated spots tied to in-store demonstrators, tastings, point-of-purchase displays and bulk shelving, so that awareness and purchase moved together. Kagome, again prioritising ketchup, did not answer on air. By fiscal 1973 sales reached $8.4M (¥2bn) and “yakiniku no tare means Ebara” had settled in the market. Roughly a hundred food makers piled into the category in the first half of the 1970s — Momoya launched in 1974 and grew into the number-two position — but the recognition Ebara had bought first held them off. The industry called it the first tare war.

In 1978 Ebara launched a second grill-sauce brand, Kogen no Aji. Where the category was built on soy sauce, this was based on apple, peach, plum and mango: mild, thick and glossy, with an effect that tenderised the meat. The price went from 180g at $1 (¥150) to 210g at $1 (¥300) — double, at a stroke. When the sales department, certain that nothing sold at twice the price, returned only token forecasts, Morimura gathered every branch manager at a hotel and ordered every number rewritten. The nationwide launch in June 1978 brought in more than twice what the salesmen had forecast. The fruit base was also aimed at the Kansai market, where the Ebara name was still weaker than in the east.

Backed by simultaneous national television advertising, Kogen no Aji did $12.9M (¥3bn) in its first year and rose to share top billing with the original tare. By 1979 the category ranked Ebara at 50%, Momoya 20%, Daisho 14% and Kagome 8% — the second tare war, as the trade press had it. Ebara expanded the Gunma plant in 1980 to a capacity the smaller entrants could not match, and through the 1980s they left the category one by one. Fiscal 1981 sales of $77.5M (¥17bn) were roughly 114 times the $416,667 (¥150m) of thirteen years earlier; the national share of grill sauce was 60%, and 80% in the Kanto and Koshinetsu region around head office. Sukiyaki no Tare followed in 1984 and a Kansai-style soy version in 1987, and the Tsuyama plant in 1994 gave the company a western Japan base.

What the profits from those two products bought did not stick. A frozen-food subsidiary was acquired in 1981, an in-house advertising agency spun out in 1984, and in 1988 both a US subsidiary and a restaurant company were founded — the first to sell the sauce in America, the second to run grill restaurants on the strength of the brand. None of them connected to what Ebara actually possessed: a butcher-and-wholesaler channel, and the ability to formulate a sauce. A major supermarket’s verdict — that outside tare the company’s marketing was weak — was really a comment on how tightly its selling power was bound to one product. The American company was wound up in 1996, the restaurant business dissolved in 1999, and frozen food was sold off in 2006. Each was cut within roughly a decade, before the losses accumulated — decisive, and a habit that left the company with nothing earning outside its one category.

Growth in grill sauce stopped. Kikkoman entered in 1996 and gained share through the 2000s, the domestic population began to shrink, and Ebara settled into a plateau of roughly $569.7M (¥50bn) in sales — the end of an expansion that had multiplied revenue 114-fold in thirteen years. The company spent the early 2000s tidying its corporate structure and strengthening research, opening a central laboratory in Kanagawa in 2003, and in November of that year registered its shares over the counter, listing on the JASDAQ exchange in December 2004 — forty-six years after it was founded. A Shanghai subsidiary followed in 2005, and the frozen-food business was sold in 2006.

Morimura Kunio died in 2010 at ninety-one. In April 2012 Miyazaki Jun became the fourth president and turned the company toward profitability rather than volume. The 2013 merger of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges moved the listing to the TSE, and Ebara stepped up to the Second Section in November 2013 and the First Section in December 2014. In 2017 Miyazaki relaunched Kogen no Aji: fruit-based grill sauces were commoditising against Kikkoman and others, and presenting the product as new was a way to refuse the supermarkets’ discount demands and hold a proper margin. Sales dipped while old stock cleared, but promotional spending fell from $66M (¥7bn) in fiscal 2016 to $58M (¥6bn) the next year, lifting the operating margin by a point.

In April 2020 Morimura Takeshi — son of the second president and the founder’s grandson — became the fifth president, the third generation of the family in the job, days before the government declared a state of emergency over COVID-19. Home cooking surged: fiscal 2020 brought record consolidated results, with sales of $467.3M (¥51bn), operating profit of $32.8M (¥4bn) and net profit of $22.8M (¥3bn). The strategic answer to a shrinking household, though, is smaller packages: the Puchitto line of single-serve seasoning pods for hotpot, udon and Chinese dishes is positioned as the growth category, alongside the first new Kogen no Aji flavour in decades, a citrus version launched in 2020.

The second growth axis is Southeast Asia, approached the opposite way to 1988: subsidiaries in Taiwan (2017), Singapore (2018), Thailand (2021) and Malaysia (2022) sell products made in Japanese plants into local food service and retail, a light model designed to keep the cost of withdrawal low. In April 2022 the exchange’s restructuring moved Ebara from the First Section to the Standard market. The mid-term plan running to March 2026, Ebara Reboot 2026, sets EBITDA of $25.3M (¥4bn), overseas sales of at least 5% of the total — and, in front of both, a total shareholder return ratio of 50% or more. For a maker holding 60% of a category in a shrinking country, with the next pillar not yet settled, the promise put at the centre of the plan is not growth but the return of the cash the one category earns. Sales in the year to March 2026 were $316.1M (¥50bn).