Full withdrawal from frozen food, advertising and logistics (2006)

The strength of one point, and its other side

That a company which had created the grill-sauce product itself should use the money from that success to look for a second pillar is, as a way of growing, nothing unusual. In Ebara’s case, though, the places chosen — frozen food, advertising, restaurants, the United States — were scattered wide, and none of them connected directly to its own channel of butchers and food wholesalers, or to the skill of formulating the taste of a sauce. The verdict of a major supermarket, that outside tare the company’s marketing was inferior, can also be read as pointing out that it was not the strength of the product but the strength of the delivery that was bound to one particular product.

The withdrawals themselves came quickly. Eight years in America, eleven in restaurants, and frozen food handed to another company without waiting for the losses to pile up. Rather than hold on and widen the wound, the pattern was repeated of letting go at the stage where no contribution to earnings could be foreseen. On the other hand, as a result of continuing to choose narrowing over widening, consolidated sales have stayed around $569.7M (¥50bn) for twenty years. How far outside a profitable narrow market a company should venture — the same question can be seen carried forward into the Southeast Asian expansion of the 2020s and the acquisitions around the commercial-use business.