Closing the Zushi plant for the Kamakura kitchen centre — building the central-kitchen network (1994)

A plant held as a function, a plant that became an asset

Three distribution centres, all rented, for total investment of something like ¥120m — the answer the president gave in a 1999 lecture contains the core of the decision. Having chosen direct operation throughout and the “number one in the district” trade, there was no way to stop a handmade taste varying from store to store except to strip the preparation out of the kitchens. And yet the money was wanted for stores. A rented central kitchen was the compromise that satisfied both. Separating having a plant from building one is where the lightness of this period lay.

That lightness did not last. Total investment in the Nagahama plant ran to about ¥4.5bn — an order of magnitude away from the rented years. The reason for building it was the increase in stores in western Japan brought by the acquisitions of Reins International and Kappa Create: rather than a capability existing first and then supporting acquisitions, it was largely the acquisitions that set the scale of the capability. And as Ootoya’s president Kubota sought to protect the virtue of cooking inside the restaurant, there are signs on which standardisation does not take. Vertical integration is a device for lowering cost, but it is also a mechanism that forces the question, every time, of what to leave intact in the company you have bought.