Toridoll Holdings - Company History

Awata Takaya, born in 1961, left Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, saved his stake from student jobs, and in August 1985 opened a yakitori bar in Kakogawa, a provincial city west of Kobe. He called it Toridoll Sanbankan — “third house” — because he hoped one day to own three yakitori shops. Two things about that first eight-tsubo room outlasted it: a suburban roadside catchment rather than a city centre, and food cooked by hand in front of the customer.

Through the 1990s the format kept changing. The business was incorporated as Toridoll Co. in October 1995; in 1998 it opened a Japanese-style yakitori family diner, and in 1999 began converting its Western-style izakaya into the family-dining brand Toridooru, folding the other names into it. The logic was that a late-night bar taking second- and third-stop drinkers could not lift its spend per head, so the customer base had to widen to families arriving in daylight. None of these formats made the company; the search for the next one did.

It arrived in 2000. Taking his cue from the popularity of Sanuki udon in Kagawa, his father’s home province, Awata opened Marugame Seimen in Kakogawa that November: noodles struck from flour in the shop itself, and a self-service counter where customers carried their own bowls. At a moment when chains were competing on the efficiency of central kitchens, Toridoll deliberately put the labour back into every store and sold the performance of it. Awata has since called in-store noodle-making the spirit of the brand — the demonstration and the specialism being, in his account, the foundation of both footfall and margin. Choosing the customer’s experience over the operator’s efficiency became the company’s design principle.

With Marugame Seimen as its engine the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market in February 2006. Parent sales in the year to March 2006 were $71.7M (¥8bn); they reached ¥10.9 billion the next year, ¥16.5 billion the year after and ¥24.5 billion by March 2009, driven almost entirely by roadside openings. In December 2008 it moved up to the first section of the Tokyo exchange.

Consolidated sales then ran to ¥48.8 billion in the year to March 2011, ¥61.1 billion in 2012 and ¥70.9 billion in 2013; management noted in May 2013 that revenue had multiplied roughly 13.8 times in eight years. The strategy was singular in both senses — one standardised, low-priced, self-service udon format, replicated across suburban Japan.

Overseas began early and small. The first foreign store, Marugame Udon, opened in Honolulu in April 2011; a franchised store followed in Bangkok in 2012, with a Hong Kong holding company to run the overseas business and an operating company in Taiwan soon after. The venture lost money at first. What it bought was the answer to a question — whether a Japanese experience built on making noodles in front of the customer would carry abroad.

In August 2014 Marugame Seimen ran national television advertising for the first time, promoting high-priced seasonal menus, and sales jumped. The company repeated the formula eight times a year — until the domestic count passed the mid-700s and stores began eating each other’s catchments, at which point same-store sales fell below the prior year. Awata admitted in 2014 that the decline had come a year and a half to two years sooner than his own arithmetic had predicted; he kept the 1,000-store target and started looking for another move.

The fix came from outside. When the seasonal-campaign formula stopped working in 2018, Awata handed the turnaround to Morioka Tsuyoshi of the marketing firm Katana, whose September 2018 research found two things: the campaign advertising was not reaching infrequent customers, and the company’s single greatest asset since founding — noodles made from flour in every shop — was barely known to the public at all. From late January 2019 the advertising switched to the noodle-making itself, and from May 2019 same-store sales beat the prior year in almost every month.

The plateau had also exposed the structural problem of depending on one format. In October 2016 the company moved to a holding structure as Toridoll Holdings, transferring domestic operations to a subsidiary — a platform for taking in pillars from outside rather than growing them. In 2017 it bought the operators of the standing bar Banpaiya and the tonkotsu ramen chain Zundou-ya; in 2018 Tam Jai International in Hong Kong, a Japanese-curry chain based in Singapore, and the American poke brand Pokeworks. The bill followed: impairments, mostly on domestic stores, cut operating profit in the year to March 2019 from ¥7.6 billion to ¥2.3 billion. Not every purchase worked, and the work shifted from buying businesses to raising them.

COVID-19 hit a company built on eating in. In the year to March 2021 sales fell from ¥156.5 billion to $1.3B (¥135bn), with an operating loss of $68.4M (¥7bn) and a net loss of ¥5.5 billion. The recovery was unusually fast: takeaway was pushed hard and formats were judged individually on how they were coming back, and by March 2022 sales were ¥153.4 billion with operating profit of $129.3M (¥14bn) and net profit of ¥9.0 billion — a record level. In May 2022 the company set out a new mission and a medium-term plan running to March 2028, managed as a rolling three-year plan beneath longer-term targets, and made ROIC a headline measure. Awata told the briefing that chasing growth alone distorts a company, and that the return on each individual store would now be examined.

From there the growth axis moved decisively abroad. The Hong Kong subsidiary Tam Jai International listed on that city’s exchange in October 2021, and in July 2023 Toridoll acquired The Fulham Shore, operator of the pizza chain Franco Manca and the Greek restaurant group The Real Greek, giving it a European network in a single step. Consolidated sales rose from ¥188.3 billion in the year to March 2023 to ¥232.0 billion, then $1.8B (¥268bn) in the year to March 2025 — successive records. A yakitori bar had become a group running several formats across several continents.

The segment numbers show both the achievement and the unfinished part of it. For the year to March 2025 Marugame Seimen produced $845.5M (¥128bn) of revenue and other domestic businesses ¥35.4 billion, while overseas reached $691.1M (¥105bn) — close to the domestic core. But overseas segment profit was only ¥2.5 billion, held down by impairments taken as openings were pushed through quickly. Whether the value the company built by striking noodles in front of its customers can be rooted in each foreign market, and whether scale abroad can be turned into steady earnings, is the question of the next stage.