Company history

Toyo Suisan began in March 1953 as Yokosuka Suisan, set up inside the Tsukiji fish market in central Tokyo to export frozen tuna and wholesale domestic seafood — a fish trade started in a country still short of protein after the war. The name came from founder Kazuo Mori’s home city of Yokosuka. Because a seafood trader has to store what it handles, in 1955 it took on cold storage in Kawasaki — the seed of the cold-logistics business it still runs — and in 1956 it began making fish ham and sausage, then a cheap source of animal protein. That same year it renamed itself Toyo Suisan, and in 1957 moved to its present head office in Konan, Tokyo.

The pattern was diversification by adjacency. From storing fish it took on refrigeration; from selling fish it made fish sausage; and in April 1961 it stepped into instant noodles — three years behind Nissin’s Chicken Ramen, and a clear late entrant. What set its noodles apart was not novelty but the name: in 1962 it adopted the “Maruchan” mark, taken from the childhood nickname of Mori’s eldest daughter — a homely, approachable brand the company then grew behind.

Through the 1960s it laid down a national factory network — Saitama, Sagami, Fukuoka, the Kofu Toyo subsidiary in Yamanashi, Hachinohe in Aomori — and settled in as the domestic No. 2 in instant noodles, behind Nissin. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section in 1970, added Osaka and Nagoya, and was promoted to the first section in 1973: from a stall inside Tsukiji to a listed company in twenty years.

Through the late 1970s and 1980s Toyo Suisan built the products that still anchor it at home. It began fresh-noodle production in 1975, and its flagship packaged bowls — Akai Kitsune (“Red Fox”) udon and Midori no Tanuki (“Green Tanuki”) soba — turned Maruchan into a household brand, holding second place in instant noodles behind Nissin. It broadened the food base too, taking capital stakes in the soy-sauce maker Yutaka Foods and the pickle house Shuetsu.

The decisive move, though, pointed overseas. In May 1987 it set up Pack Maru INC in Washington State — at first a packaging operation, later its North American sales base — and in April 1989 it established Maruchan Virginia INC on the East Coast, entering the North American instant-noodle market directly. It arrived late, and at an awkward moment for Japanese noodles abroad, when Nissin was struggling in the United States. Rather than follow Nissin in, Toyo Suisan chose a different route to the American shopper — one it would spend the next decade perfecting.

What made Maruchan dominant in North America was not being first but localizing completely. Where Nissin pushed largely Japanese-style flavours as one global product, Toyo Suisan tuned its ramen to Mexican-American tastes — spicier Ramen Picante, quick single-serve bowls — and sold them through the stores those households actually used, until instant ramen became part of everyday Mexican-American home cooking rather than an imported novelty. By the 1990s it ran three bases — Maruchan Inc (California), Maruchan Virginia (East Coast) and Maruchan de Mexico — covering North and Central America, and it became the category leader in a market where, back home in Japan, the brand was barely known.

The result was a profit structure with no parallel among Japanese food makers. By the year ended March 2016 the overseas noodle business was earning an operating margin of about 15.7% — on $710.2M (¥77bn) of sales — against roughly 8.1% at home, and Toyo Suisan is often described as the only Japanese maker whose overseas noodle business out-earns its domestic one.

At home the story was consolidation and caution. Kazuo Mori led the company for forty-two years, to 1995; under third president Tadashi Tsutsumi (2003–2012) sales held roughly flat while ordinary profit rose about 1.7 times, as the mix shifted toward the higher-return overseas noodles. The house style — steady quality and distribution over flashy marketing, and unusual restraint on acquisitions and capital spending — kept the company unglamorous, but it also kept it clear of the write-downs that dogged rivals, and it tidied its group by absorbing and fully buying in listed affiliates.

Under fifth president Masaya Imamura (2014–2023), a sales-side executive, Toyo Suisan’s earnings climbed as the North American Maruchan business compounded and a weak yen inflated the yen value of overseas profits. Group net profit roughly tripled across his tenure: the COVID-era surge in eating at home lifted instant-noodle demand worldwide to a then-record, and successive rounds of yen weakness carried profit higher still.

In 2023 Noritaka Sumimoto — who had run the US subsidiaries Maruchan Inc and Maruchan Virginia — became the sixth president, the first time the top job went to someone whose formative experience was the overseas noodle business that is the company’s core edge. Records kept falling: net profit reached new highs into the year ended March 2025 and beyond, still driven by the North American share and steadied by the low-temperature and processed-food lines at home.

The largest bet now is a new plant in California. North American retail has been hit by a wave of mergers and closures on the scale of the pandemic, weakening the ground under its most profitable business, yet the company — restrained on capex and M&A for decades — is spending down its accumulated cash to expand capacity, with the replacement of nearly-fifty-year-old US equipment also in view. Construction delays from labour shortages and material lead-times have pushed start-up toward the end of the current year and will raise depreciation next year. It is the biggest capacity investment yet toward a medium-term goal of a 20% operating margin overseas — the clearest test of whether the brand that began as a founder’s daughter’s nickname can keep compounding abroad.