MMD and the multi-format chain built by acquisition (2005)

Selling the pattern, not the product

At the core of the decisions of this period was a reframing: the “manufacturing-and-selling business” established with a single product, the beef bowl, was understood not as a product but as a pattern. A mechanism that binds procurement through to the counter in-house works whether the format is sushi or a family restaurant — and it was because Zensho judged so that it bought one different format after another and, rather than folding them together, kept them intact while placing them on a shared operating base. Standardising only the back end without erasing the colour of each brand was an attempt to have both economies of scale and diversity on the floor.

What holds such a group together, though, is not an easy question to answer. Whether the ideal Ogawa Kentaro raised — to be the world’s number one in food — had taken root in every corner of the organisation was already being asked at the time. Diversification by buying and keeping produced scale; at the same time, the structure by which a management chasing numbers pushed the strain onto labour on the floor would later surface as the problems around Sukiya. What the multi-format design laid down in the 2000s left behind, between the pursuit of scale and the reality on the ground, is measured in the company’s subsequent course.