Food & Life Companies (Sushiro) - Company History

Sushiro began in October 1984, when Shimizu Yoshio set up Sushi Taro in Toyonaka, Osaka, and opened his first store there. Shimizu was a trained sushi chef, which made the company an oddity in conveyor-belt sushi: alone among the chains, it came out of a sushi counter rather than out of restaurant operation. It was also late. The established conveyor chains were already multiplying stores, and a latecomer with no scale had only one axis left to compete on — the quality of the sushi itself.

The first half of the 1990s turned that craft into an organization. In October 1991 the company switched its expansion policy to directly operated stores and opened Ochiai, its first store with a round-trip conveyor, in Kobe; running the stores itself put operating quality under head-office control. In December 1995 it built a preparation plant next to its Takarazuka Akura store, so that fish no longer had to be prepped in the back of each shop. Direct operation and centralized preparation were not, at the time, glamorous choices — but together they were the precondition for everything the company did next.

In September 1996 the company opened Takashi, in Takarazuka, at a flat $1 (¥100) a plate. At that time the ¥100 segment was shorthand in Japan for cheap and nasty; the third president, Toyosaki Kenichi, later recalled that conveyor-belt sushi was simply not taken seriously. Walking into that segment as a chef-run business was a refusal of the choice between price and quality. It was also a transfer of risk: fixing the price means the company, not the customer, carries every swing in the cost of fish — a move available only to a firm that already held direct operation and its own preparation.

The identity followed the format. In 1999 it merged with the identically named company run by Shimizu’s younger brother, consolidating the family business into one; in December 2000 it renamed itself Akindo Sushiro — あきんど, “merchant” — and moved to Settsu with a new plant and warehouse inside the head office. Kanto followed in 2001 and Chubu in 2002, and in September 2003, nineteen years after the first store, it listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Then it reversed its own centralization: in 2003 it handed Kanto delivery to outside logistics, and in 2004 it abolished the head-office plant altogether, pushing preparation out to regional kitchens so that distance shrank as the store network spread. Head office moved to Suita in 2005.

The founder stepped down in April 2006, handing the presidency to a professional operator — the first break between owner and manager. Then came 2008. Between January and July the chain made its first openings in Shikoku, Tohoku, Kyushu and Hokkaido, covering every major region but Okinawa in six months. In the same year, in September, AS Holdings — a vehicle of Unison Capital — launched a tender offer, and by November held 65.19% of the shares.

The company left the market in April 2009 and was absorbed into the acquisition vehicle a month later. Toyosaki Kenichi became president in June and ran the private phase. Freed from quarterly disclosure, management could put money and attention into openings and store improvement on a longer clock — the point of going private in the first place, and the thing that made the later recovery possible.

In April 2011, with 321 stores at home and expansion room thinning, it set up Sushiro Korea in Seoul — its first move abroad, and the seed of the later network in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand. In September 2012 Permira, through CEIL Japan, bought out Unison’s entire holding, merged the company into itself in January 2013 and restored the Akindo Sushiro name. Two funds in five years, each handover bringing another reorganization and another change of corporate name.

In February 2015 Toyosaki gave way to Mizutome Koichi, brought in from outside after Dentsu and Japan Airlines — the first president who had not come up through the business. A month later the group moved to a holding-company structure, renamed the holding company Sushiro Global Holdings in October, and split its urban, higher-priced formats into a separate company. The scaffolding for relisting, for acquisitions and for overseas subsidiaries was now in place.

Okinawa in 2015 completed coverage of all forty-seven prefectures; a first urban-format store followed in 2016. In March 2017 the group relisted on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, eight years after leaving it — the exit through which Permira recovered its investment. Overseas subsidiaries then came in a run: Taiwan in 2017, Singapore in 2018, Hong Kong in 2019, Thailand in 2020, China in 2021. A 2017 capital tie-up with Shinmei and Genki Sushi, aimed at consolidating the domestic industry, produced nothing and was unwound in 2019.

In April 2021 the holding company dropped Sushiro from its own name and became FOOD & LIFE COMPANIES — a deliberate redefinition from conveyor-belt sushi to food and daily life. In the same month it bought Kyotaru, the long-established takeaway sushi chain in stations and department stores, to catch the takeaway demand that the pandemic had created. The group now stood on three legs: eat-in Sushiro, takeaway Kyotaru, and the higher-priced urban formats. Then, in October 2022, the promise that had defined it since 1996 was folded up: a weak yen and rising raw-material costs pushed the flat ¥100 plate to $1 (¥120)–$1 (¥150).

In October 2024 Mizutome handed over to Yamamoto Masahiro after some nine and a half years. By FY2025 (year to September) revenue reached $2.9B (¥430bn) with operating profit of $240.6M (¥36bn), and the centre of gravity had moved: overseas Sushiro grew from $154.9M (¥17bn) in FY2021 to $878M (¥131bn), more than 30% of sushi revenue, against ¥265.9 billion at home. Kyotaru, by contrast, fell short and is being pruned. The medium-term plan calls for the largest opening programme in the company’s history and an overseas network of 300–320 stores, while a 2024 tie-up with the sea-urchin farming venture Uninomics addresses the risk that sits under all of it — that warming seas will move the fish the whole business is built on.