Leaving exports for the home market — a Tokyo office and a brand of its own (1956)

Thinning a healthy business in order to own a name

What marks this decision is that the money and the people were pulled out of a business that was working. Exports were strong in 1956, and nothing in the figures called for a move to the domestic market. The second Goto Isokichi moved anyway — not out of dissatisfaction with the returns, but with an arrangement in which nothing came back to the company about who received what it made, or how. Contract production through trading houses was steady work for as long as demand held; the price of that steadiness was losing sight of the customer. In refusing that trade, one can see the beginnings of the brand company Hagoromo Foods later became.

The results, though, took ten years to appear, and sales did not grow in the meantime. Without the next bet — the television campaign of 1967 — the shift might have ended as nothing more than a scattering of resources. And concentrating on Sea Chicken, while it produced the company’s advantage during the years of the strong yen, was also a choice to let the seeds of other products go. The task Hagoromo Foods has faced repeatedly since the 1990s — outgrowing its dependence on Sea Chicken — appears to be the reverse side of the road chosen in 1956.