Ebara Foods Industry - Company History

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Financial history 1968–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1958
Founder Morimura Kunio
Founding location 神奈川県横浜市
Core business at founding Contract manufacture of foodservice sauce and ketchup
Listed 2004
President Morimura Takeshi President since 2020 (age 46, as of 2026)
Current priority New product development · Overseas expansion Growing portion seasonings and foodservice sales in South-East Asia
Founding
In May 1958 Morimura Kunio established Ebara Shokuhin in Matsumicho, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama. Having served as head of a sales office at Kinkei Foods, the Osaka company run by his brothers, he chose to set up on his own in the same seasonings trade. At the outset the business was foodservice sauce and ketchup made under the Kinkei brand together with contract production of soup for instant ramen, a position close to subcontracting for restaurants and food manufacturers. When Morimura turned to running the company full time in September 1965 it had fewer than ten employees, monthly sales below $2,778 (¥1m) and $11,111 (¥4m) borrowed from a private lender at 5 per cent a month. In April 1968 the Kinkei brand was switched to Ebara, and in July that year the corporate name was changed to Ebara Foods Industry. Even so, sales in the year to March 1968 came to no more than $416,667 (¥150m).
The Decision
The company kept off shelves where others had gone first and put its products where there was no shelf at all. Yakiniku no Tare, launched in 1967, went into the meat section of butchers’ shops rather than the supermarkets the majors held. Repeated in-store sampling won it a place beside the till, an effort the company called Operation Mole, and from 1968 it spent three years building up occasions for households to taste the sauce. In 1970 a company with sales of $1.3M (¥450m) took its television advertising nationwide. The first region bought was Shizuoka, which belonged to neither the capital nor the Kansai cultural sphere, and the commercials were then concentrated region by region in bursts of two quarters, six months at a time. In June 1978 Kogen no Aji was launched nationwide at double the price, 210g for ¥300 against 180g for ¥150, and orders came back at more than twice what the sales division had forecast. Raising its own price point gave the company a 50 per cent share of yakiniku sauce in 1979 and drove the smaller makers out during the 1980s.
Today
More than nine-tenths of sales are still domestic, and the growth the company is looking for lies in single-serve sizes. Consolidated revenue for the year to March 2026 was $316.1M (¥50bn) and operating profit $15.2M (¥2bn), foods accounting for $268.1M (¥42bn) of revenue and $17.7M (¥3bn) of profit and logistics for $43M (¥7bn) and $632,271 (¥100m). After registering over the counter in November 2003 the company listed on the Jasdaq Securities Exchange in December 2004, and Miyazaki Jun, who became president in April 2012, put profitability ahead of growth in sales. The 2017 renewal of Kogen no Aji cut promotional spending from $66M (¥7bn) to $57.1M (¥6bn) and lifted the operating margin by one point. Morimura Takeshi, president since April 2020, has made portion seasonings such as the one- and two-serving Puchitto Nabe pouches, together with foodservice in South-East Asia, the areas to grow, and the medium-term plan running from the 2024 financial year sets EBITDA of $26.4M (¥4bn), an overseas sales ratio above 5 per cent and a total return ratio above 50 per cent.
Competition
It was thirty years before the majors came into the market the company had made. Kagome went first with Kagome Barbecue Sauce in 1962, but because it concentrated its investment on ketchup, its core business, its promotion stayed limited, and Ebara Foods Industry, entering late, took the recognition first. The leading makers in 1979 were Ebara with 50 per cent, Momoya with 20 per cent, Daisho Foods with 14 per cent and Kagome with 8 per cent; after the Gunma plant was extended in 1980 the smaller makers withdrew during that decade. The domestic share of 60 per cent held until 1996, when Kikkoman entered yakiniku sauce and went on widening its own share through the 2000s. Abroad, an American subsidiary was set up in March 1988 alongside a move into restaurants, but the American company was liquidated in March 1996 and the restaurant business dissolved in December 1999. What the company held on to was a single domestic category; from the businesses that required production or operation on the ground it withdrew both times.

Timeline

1958–1969From foodservice-sauce subcontractor to Yakiniku no Tare and the butcher-shop route

  1. 1958Ebara Shokuhin founded in Yokohama; Kinkei-brand sauce and ketchup production begins
  2. 1962Kagome launches Kagome Barbecue Sauce; the meat-sauce market exists but does not spread
  3. 1965Morimura Kunio turns to running the firm full time: under ten staff, monthly sales below ¥1m
  4. 1967Yakiniku no Tare launched, sold through the butcher-shop route
  5. 1968The Kinkei brand is switched to the Ebara brand in April
  6. 1968Renamed Ebara Foods Industry Co., Ltd. in July
  7. 1968Sales of ¥150m in the year to March, ten years after founding

1970–1999The first and second tare wars, and 60 per cent of the market with Kogen no Aji

  1. 1970Nationwide television campaign begins, bought first in Shizuoka
  2. 1972Isehara plant comes on stream
  3. 1973Sales reach ¥2.3bn; yakiniku sauce comes to mean Ebara
  4. 1974Momoya enters with a yakiniku sauce of its own — the first tare war
  5. 1975Head office moves to Sawatari, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama
  6. 1978Kogen no Aji launched at double the price, 210g for ¥300
  7. 1979Ebara holds 50 per cent of the category, Momoya 20 per cent
  8. 1980Gunma plant comes on stream; Yokohama plant closes
  9. 1981Sales reach ¥17.1bn and the national share reaches 60 per cent
  10. 1981Nihon Reishoku made a subsidiary; entry into frozen foods
  11. 1984Tochigi plant on stream, Isehara closed; Sukiyaki no Tare launched
  12. 1988US EBARA FOODS and Ebara Corporation set up — America and restaurants
  13. 1994Tsuyama plant on stream as the base for western Japan
  14. 1996US EBARA FOODS liquidated
  15. 1999Ebara Corporation dissolved; exit from the restaurant business

2000–2025The Jasdaq listing, Miyazaki’s turn to profitability, and the overseas and portion strategy

  1. 2001Ebalay renamed Ebara Foods Industry and merged, to adopt the unit-share system
  2. 2003Shares registered over the counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association
  3. 2004Listed on the Jasdaq Securities Exchange, 46 years after founding
  4. 2005Ebara Foods (Shanghai) established
  5. 2006All shares in Nihon Reishoku sold; exit from frozen foods
  6. 2010Founder Morimura Kunio dies at 91
  7. 2012Miyazaki Jun becomes fourth president; profitability put ahead of sales
  8. 2014Shares reassigned to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
  9. 2017Taiwan Ebara Foods established; Kogen no Aji renewed
  10. 2018EBARA SINGAPORE established
  11. 2020Morimura Takeshi becomes fifth president; Kogen no Aji Sawayaka Lemon launched
  12. 2021EBARA FOODS (THAILAND) established; record profit on stay-at-home demand
  13. 2022Moved to the Standard Market; EBARA FOODS MALAYSIA established
  14. 2023Shares in Maruni acquired; the Ebara-style job-based system introduced
  15. 2024Medium-term plan Ebara Reboot 2026 set, with a total return ratio above 50 per cent

Founding Story

1958–1969From foodservice-sauce subcontractor to Yakiniku no Tare and the butcher-shop route

Ebara Foods Industry began in May 1958 as a Yokohama subcontractor making sauce and ketchup under another company’s brand, and for ten years that is what it stayed — fewer than ten employees, borrowing at 5 per cent a month, unable to shift the majors who held the category. Its opening came not from fighting for the sauce shelf but from a product that had no shelf yet: a sauce for grilling meat at home, sold at the place where the meat itself was bought.

A small food maker set up as a Yokohama subcontractor in foodservice sauce

In May 1958 the founder, Morimura Kunio (森村国夫)[1], then 39, established Ebara Shokuhin K.K. in Matsumicho, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama[2]. Kunio had served as head of the Osaka sales office of Kinkei Foods — an Osaka food manufacturer making fruit sauce and ketchup, run by his brothers — and chose to set up on his own in the same seasonings trade. At the outset the business was the manufacture of foodservice sauce and ketchup under the Kinkei brand[3] together with contract production of soup seasoning for instant ramen: a position close to subcontracting in foodservice seasonings, with restaurants and food manufacturers as its main customers.

The market for foodservice sauce was held by established majors such as Bull-Dog Sauce and Kagome, and a small Yokohama food maker could not easily stand against them on price or on delivery scale. When Kunio began to devote himself to running Ebara Shokuhin in September 1965, the company was a backstreet workshop of fewer than ten employees renting rooms in the house of Tanaka Chuichiro; monthly sales were under ¥1m, and, having been cut off by the banks, it carried ¥4m borrowed from a private lender at 5 per cent a month[4]. Sauce and ketchup production, pushed aside by branded goods, could ship only the contents used by canteens and eating houses, and its decline was already visible. In the year to March 1968 Ebara Shokuhin’s sales came to no more than $416,667 (¥150m)[5], and nearly ten years after the founding the company had found no means of overturning the competitive structure of the established majors in the existing sauce-and-ketchup categories.

The next move Kunio chose was not a frontal assault in an existing category but entry into an area of seasoning not yet established as a product genre. At the time the miso-ramen soup he had launched earlier was beginning to sell to Chinese restaurants, and Kunio was watching yakiniku restaurants — houses serving grilled meat — open one after another on the streets and draw crowds of young customers[6]. Where miso-ramen soup took Chinese restaurants and ramen shops as its channel, a yakiniku sauce could take butchers’ shops, so it would not collide with the company’s existing goods. Kagome had launched Kagome Barbecue Sauce in 1962, confirming that a market for meat sauce existed, but in a Japan where yakiniku had not settled in as home cooking the product had not spread. After sampling his way round several dozen yakiniku restaurants[7], Kunio identified how difficult the seasoning of meat became when it was grilled at home, and how large a part the tare — the marinade and dipping sauce — played.

Launching Yakiniku no Tare and opening the butcher-shop route with Operation Mole

In 1967 Ebara Foods launched Yakiniku no Tare, a sauce for grilled meat. Grilling meat at home was not an established habit in the Japan of the day, but with supermarkets spreading and household refrigerator ownership rising there were signs that buying cheap raw meat and grilling it at home was becoming part of everyday eating. Kagome had gone first in 1962 with Kagome Barbecue Sauce, but because Kagome concentrated its investment on ketchup, its core business, promotion of the yakiniku-sauce category remained limited. Ebara Shokuhin entered late and yet gained the chance to take first-mover recognition in a category where the competitor would not invest.

In April 1968 the company switched from the Kinkei brand to the Ebara brand[8], and in July of the same year changed its corporate name to Ebara Foods Industry Co., Ltd.[9] — a management decision to unify the product brand of the yakiniku sauce with the name of the company. To open a route into the household market it set up sales offices in sequence, starting from the Kanto region, and by the 1980s had built a distribution network dividing the country into eleven blocks. In each block it signed distributorship agreements with one or two food wholesalers, putting in place a multi-tier system that carried goods from the distributor on to secondary wholesalers, retailers and consumers.

The distinguishing feature of the sales strategy was concentrated investment in the butcher-shop route rather than in the supermarket selling that was then the mainstream. To get consumers to try an unfamiliar seasoning, the company repeated in-store sampling at butchers’ shops and spent its time on the patient work of being given a place for Yakiniku no Tare beside the till in the meat section. Inside the company this was named Operation Mole (モグラ作戦), after the effort to keep the selling inconspicuous so that the large food manufacturers would not notice the movement — a tactic of making the sauce a fixture in the meat section before majors such as Bull-Dog Sauce and Kagome could react. In the year to March 1970 Ebara Foods Industry was a small company with sales of $1.3M (¥450m) and 34 employees, and its main bank was the Myorenji branch of the Bank of Yokohama, a regional bank.

An asymmetric strategy: entering late and taking the first mover’s recognition

The management decision Ebara Foods Industry took with Yakiniku no Tare was a textbook case of the asymmetric strategy of entering late and taking the recognition that belongs to the first mover. Kagome, first in, launched Kagome Barbecue Sauce in 1962, but because it gave priority to investment in its core ketchup business its promotional investment in the yakiniku-sauce category was limited. Ebara Foods Industry saw through that thinness and took the strategy of entering late into a category the first mover would not invest in and getting ahead of it in the contest for recognition.

The choice of sales channel was asymmetric as well. The main battleground for household seasonings was the food floor of the supermarket, where the earlier entrants Bull-Dog Sauce and Kagome held the shelves. Ebara Foods Industry deliberately concentrated its selling on the butcher’s shop, the place where meat was sold, securing a position from which Yakiniku no Tare was offered as an option at the very moment the consumer bought the meat. Butchers turned their stock faster than food supermarkets and were a point of contact at which a seasoning could be recommended at the same time as the raw meat was purchased. This choice of route to the customer avoided a direct contest with the distribution networks of the established majors while settling the habit of using yakiniku sauce in meat dishes cooked at home.

The stealth selling known as Operation Mole also had the effect of buying time by delaying any pre-emptive response from competitors. The three years from 1968 to 1970 were a preparatory period in which Ebara Foods Industry slipped beneath the majors’ watch, won shelf space for the yakiniku sauce on the butcher-shop route and accumulated occasions for households to taste it. The nationwide television campaign of 1970, which led with advertising, was positioned as a second-stage rocket that used the ground prepared on that butcher-shop route to lift household recognition all at once.

1970–1999The first and second tare wars, and 60 per cent of the market with Kogen no Aji

This is the era in which a small company chose to spend its way into the nation’s kitchens — buying television first in a single test prefecture, then region by region — and answered each new entrant not with a lower price but with a dearer product. Sales went from $1.3M (¥450m) in the year to March 1970 to $77.5M (¥17bn) in the year to March 1981 and the domestic share settled at 60 per cent; the money that bought went into businesses the company would then spend two decades leaving.

The first tare war, won by spending on television first

In 1970 Ebara Foods Industry decided to expand sales of Yakiniku no Tare nationwide by television commercial. It was a management decision by a small company with sales of $1.3M (¥450m) in that year to March to stake its future on the cost of television advertising. The first region bought was Shizuoka Prefecture, which Kunio judged the best place to test the market because it belonged neither to the cultural sphere of the capital region nor to that of Kansai. Fujimura Shunji was cast, and from the end of that year the campaign extended into the capital region through Fuji Television, with the lead performer switched to Tsuki no Ya Enkyo, later Kikkya Ensho. Commercials were bought region by region as a concentrated burst of two quarters, six months at a time, and linked with in-store demonstrators, sampling, point-of-purchase advertising and mass display, so that consumers were carried from awareness through to purchase in one connected movement. Kagome, first into the category, gave priority to investment in its core ketchup business and did not answer with commercials of its own, and Ebara Foods Industry, leading with television, spread household recognition ahead of the rest.

In the year to March 1973 sales reached $8.4M (¥2bn)[10], and the brand recognition that yakiniku sauce meant Ebara settled into the market. Food manufacturers who saw the rapid growth of Ebara Foods Industry entered the yakiniku-sauce category one after another in the first half of the 1970s, the number of entrants said to have reached one hundred companies[11]. In 1974 Momoya launched a yakiniku sauce of its own and grew it far enough to hold second place by share in 1979[12]. This period in the early 1970s is called the first tare war, and Ebara Foods Industry used the recognition it had built in the Kanto region through early television investment as a shield against the challengers coming up behind.

Television investment moved on from a stage of spot buying within the range its Kanto sales offices could cover to a form that, from 1973, expanded the regions bought in sequence and aimed at nationwide recognition. Over the five years from 1968 to 1973 the sales of Ebara Foods Industry grew about fifteenfold, from ¥150m to ¥2.3bn[13], an annual rate above 60 per cent. That growth rate was exceptional for a small food manufacturer, and it came from three elements working together: early investment in television advertising, sampling on the butcher-shop route, and the spread of yakiniku as a way of eating at home. In July 1972 the Isehara plant in Isehara, Kanagawa, came on stream and raised production capacity[14]. In February 1975 the head office moved to Sawatari in Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama[15], and in March 1980 the Yokohama plant was closed and its site put in order for use as a research laboratory[16]. In July of that year the Gunma plant in Isesaki, Gunma, came on stream and extended the Kanto production base westward[17]. In October 1981 the company made Nihon Reishoku K.K. a subsidiary and entered frozen foods[18], and in April 1984 the Tochigi plant in Sakura, Tochigi, came on stream while the Isehara plant closed[19].

Kogen no Aji and the second tare war: securing a 60 per cent share

In 1978 Ebara Foods Industry launched a new brand of yakiniku sauce, Kogen no Aji, the golden taste. Yakiniku sauces until then had been predominantly soy-sauce based, but Kogen no Aji used apple, peach, plum and mango as its base to deliver a mild flavour and an effect that tenderised the meat, together with a thick, glossy body that read as premium. The pricing was a challenge that doubled the price outright, from 180g at ¥150 to 210g at ¥300; when the sales division, saying that it would not sell at twice the price, returned only small figures in its forecasts, Kunio gathered the branch managers at the Towa Hotel and ordered every figure rewritten, forming agreement inside the company. In June 1978 Ebara Foods Industry launched Kogen no Aji nationwide at a stroke, and orders came back at more than double what the sales division had forecast. In 1978 Ebara’s brand recognition in the Kansai region was not as firmly established as in Kanto, and the new fruit-based taste was also a product designed with the capture of the Kansai market in mind.

Carried by a simultaneous nationwide television campaign, Kogen no Aji achieved sales of $11.3M (¥3bn) in its first year on the market and climbed to a position that shared the place of principal product with Yakiniku no Tare. In 1979 the leading makers of the yakiniku-sauce category were Ebara Foods Industry with a 50 per cent share, Momoya with 20 per cent, Daisho Foods with 14 per cent and Kagome with 8 per cent[20], and the trade press followed the contest as the second tare war. Against Ebara Foods Industry, which extended the Gunma plant in 1980 and built a production capacity that overwhelmed the later entrants, the lower-ranked makers including Momoya chose through the 1980s to withdraw from the yakiniku-sauce business.

In the year to March 1981 the sales of Ebara Foods Industry reached $77.5M (¥17bn)[21], growth of about 114 times in thirteen years from ¥150m in 1968[22]. Its national share of yakiniku sauce was 60 per cent, and 80 per cent in the Kanto and Koshinetsu region around the head office, so that the recognition that yakiniku sauce meant Ebara settled in the domestic market. In 1984 it launched Sukiyaki no Tare, a sauce for sukiyaki, the hot pot of thin-sliced beef, and in 1987 added a Kansai-style soy-sauce-based Sukiyaki no Tare Mild to complete national coverage; in April 1994 the Tsuyama plant in Tsuyama, Okayama, came on stream and established a production base for western Japan[23]. In March 1988 it set up US EBARA FOODS INC. in the United States[24], but liquidated it in March 1996 and withdrew for the time being from the American market. In April 1988 it established Ebara Corporation K.K.[25] and entered the restaurant business, only to dissolve that company in December 1999 and withdraw from restaurants as well. Outside the core household seasonings, the judgement to pull out early, at the stage where returns could not yet be foreseen, continued to be made.

Diversification beyond the sauce that never took root, 1980s–90s

From the 1980s into the 1990s Ebara Foods Industry put the profits earned by Yakiniku no Tare and Kogen no Aji into businesses on the periphery, but none of the diversification outside the core secured a contribution to earnings, and all of it moved towards withdrawal or contraction. In October 1981 it made Nihon Reishoku K.K. a subsidiary and entered frozen foods[26], but the logistics network and sales channels of frozen food differed from the distribution network of the yakiniku sauce, and no competitive advantage could be secured. In November 1984 it made its publicity department independent as Yokohama Agency K.K. and entered the full-service advertising agency business[27], but this went no further than bringing the core business’s sales-promotion work in house, and its growth as an agency earning from outside clients was limited.

The move into restaurants through Ebara Corporation K.K., established in April 1988[28], was conceived as using the recognition of the yakiniku sauce to run a chain of specialist yakiniku restaurants. The American subsidiary US EBARA FOODS INC., set up in March of the same year, was likewise an overseas venture aimed at selling Yakiniku no Tare in the United States. But the restaurant business was wound up for good with the dissolution of December 1999, and the American subsidiary was liquidated in March 1996[29]; in each case a business outside the core was judged, after roughly a decade, to be difficult to continue. Gloria Food K.K., a frozen-food distributor taken as a subsidiary in July 1991[30], also disappeared when its name was changed to Ebalay in October 1997, and the frozen-food business that had run since 1981 was fully exited with the transfer of all shares in Nihon Reishoku in March 2006.

The core Yakiniku no Tare and Kogen no Aji held their place as principal products into the 1990s and kept a domestic share at the 60 per cent level, but because no earnings contribution could be drawn in from the peripheral businesses, the growth of group sales stayed fixed in a structure governed by the maturity of the core market. The business structure of specialising in yakiniku sauce, established by the founder Morimura Kunio[31], was a strength and at the same time a double-edged structure that left the company with the task of growing a business able to earn outside the core.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. Ebara Foods Industry official website — the company’s own account of the launch↩
  2. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  3. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  4. Morimura Kunio, 2からの発想：肉があるからタレがある (Thinking from Two: Because There Is Meat, There Is Tare), May 1987↩
  5. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report↩
  6. Ebara Foods Industry official website — the company’s own account of the launch↩
  7. Ebara Foods Industry official website — the company’s own account of the launch↩
  8. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  9. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  10. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report↩
  11. 総合食品 (Sogo Shokuhin), March 1979↩
  12. 総合食品 (Sogo Shokuhin), March 1979↩
  13. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report↩
  14. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  15. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  16. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  17. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  18. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  19. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  20. 総合食品 (Sogo Shokuhin), March 1979↩
  21. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report↩
  22. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report↩
  23. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  24. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  25. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  26. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  27. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  28. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  29. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  30. Ebara Foods Industry, annual securities report — corporate history section↩
  31. Ebara Foods Industry official website — the company’s own account of the launch↩

References & sources

  1. Ebara Foods Industry Co., Ltd. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section.
  2. Sogo Shokuhin, March 1979 issue — NDL Digital Collections.
  3. Morimura Kunio, Thinking from Two, 1987 — the founder’s own account of the early years.

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