A US subsidiary and a restaurant chain — and two withdrawals (1988)

Can a way of eating be exported?

The product created its own market by planting a way of eating — grill the meat, dip it in the tare — in Japanese homes. Carry that pattern of success abroad, or into restaurants, and the same thing should happen: something like that reading seems to lie behind the two companies founded in 1988. But spreading a way of eating at the family table, running premises and serving customers a meal, and winning shelf space in a country that eats differently call for capabilities that barely overlap. A method of selling built on visiting butcher after butcher and running tastings was bound to a specific physical place — the meat counter in Japan.

Twenty years after the two withdrawals, the company is abroad again. This time there is no local production: goods made in Japanese plants flow from local sales bases into food service and retail, and the mid-term plan sets a modest target of overseas sales at 5% or more. The 1988 decision left its problem not in the scale of the move but in the design of how to make it. How far a company can carry outside a food culture it created itself is being tested again, now in the markets of Southeast Asia.