Company history

In September 1994 the company renamed itself Colowide, a coinage from Courage, Love, Wisdom and Decision — a statement that it intended to be a general restaurant company rather than the operator of one izakaya brand. The following month it closed the Zushi plant and opened a kitchen distribution centre in Kamakura, later adding Osaka and Urawa. Taking the preparation out of each store’s kitchen was the only way to keep a “handmade” taste from varying store to store once there were many stores; it is the manufacturing-retail structure the group still runs on.

The centres were rented, not built. Speaking in 1999, the president put total investment in the three of them at around ¥120m — cheap, because he wanted the capital to go into stores — and credited them with making consistent food, hygiene control and the compound-store district strategy possible at once. By the end of October 1999 there were 104 stores, mostly Amataro, across Kanagawa and Tokyo with a foothold in Osaka; average spend was held under ¥5,000, and about ¥3,000 at Amataro itself. His stated medium-term goal was an 8% ordinary margin.

Capital markets followed. Colowide registered its shares over the counter in October 1999, listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in October 2000, and moved to the First Section in September 2002 — a national listed company less than forty years from a single Zushi restaurant, with proceeds going straight into openings and distribution centres at a pace of more than thirty new stores a year. Then the method of growth changed. Acquisitions began in 2002, and in October 2004 Colowide converted to a holding company, splitting its operating arm into regional companies for eastern Japan, western Japan and Hokkaido plus a central-kitchen company. Putting operating subsidiaries beneath a holding company made it far easier to take in an outside restaurant company whole and tidy up the structure by merger afterwards — a sequence it would use again and again.

With the holding structure in place, buying restaurant companies became the main engine of growth. Atom, a conveyor-belt sushi and restaurant operator, was consolidated in October 2005; the yakiniku chain Miya followed in July 2006, alongside others. Each came with its own sign and its own network, and Colowide lined them up under the holding company with their brands intact rather than absorbing them into its own. Nor did it leave them as bought: Atom merged in a sister company in 2006, Miya was combined with another subsidiary in 2007, and duplicated functions were folded together while the brands and store networks stayed where they were.

In the 2010s the deals got much larger. In October 2012 Colowide took 66.6% of Rex Holdings, owner of the yakiniku chain Gyu-Kaku and of Reins International, absorbing one of the largest restaurant groups in Japan. In December 2014 it took 50.71% of Kappa Create Holdings, operator of the Kappa Sushi conveyor-belt chain. Izakaya, yakiniku and conveyor-belt sushi — the three principal Japanese restaurant formats — were now all inside the group, acquired rather than raised.

The effect on scale was immediate and almost arithmetical. Consolidated revenue went from about ¥128.4bn in the year to March 2013, the first under IFRS, to about ¥177.6bn in the year to March 2015 with a full year of Rex, and to about $2.2B (¥234bn) in the year to March 2016 with Kappa Create added — roughly 1.8 times in three years. Atom, Reins International, Kappa Create and the group’s procurement arm sat side by side beneath the holding company, each running its own brands: a federation rather than a chain.

The buying continued into new categories. In December 2016 Colowide took the burger chain Freshness Burger through Reins International, adding café and fast food. Then in September 2020 came the deal it is best known for: a tender offer for Ootoya Holdings, the set-meal chain, launched and completed without the agreement of Ootoya’s own management, lifting Colowide’s stake to 46.8% and making it a consolidated subsidiary. A hostile offer pushed through against an incumbent board is rare in Japan, and it drew wide attention; it also completed the set — izakaya, yakiniku, conveyor-belt sushi and now set meals, nearly every major Japanese restaurant format under one roof.

Scale of this kind carries a weight on the balance sheet. Successive acquisitions left the group with substantial goodwill, so that when trading deteriorated the write-downs came with it: a net loss of about ¥5.6bn in the year to March 2017, and then, with impairments, an operating loss of about ¥4.6bn and a net loss of about ¥6.4bn in the year to March 2020. COVID made it far worse — an operating loss of about ¥13.3bn and a net loss of about ¥10.1bn in the year to March 2021 — because a business built on people coming through the door has no defence when they stop.

The recovery was run through restructuring as much as through returning customers. Directly operated izakaya were consolidated into a single subsidiary, peripheral businesses in confectionery and contract food service were bought in 2024, the Australian operator Seagrass Holdco in 2025 and the café group C-United in 2026. Consolidated revenue for the year to March 2026 came to about $1.9B (¥300bn) with operating profit of roughly ¥9.4bn. The izakaya chain that started with one store in Zushi is now a holding company for a large number of other people’s brands.