Suspending gyudon rather than substituting the beef (2004)

The taste it kept, and the customers who did not come back

At the centre of this decision was a way of seeing the beef bowl not as a combination of ingredients but as a single design. Change the origin of the beef and the sauce and the onion have to be rebuilt too; reduce the volume and the evenness the heating produces can no longer be held. So no substitute beef was adopted and two and a half years with nothing to sell were chosen instead. As a matter of keeping a promise to regular customers it was a coherent decision, and the sell-outs across the country on the day of the relaunch showed the support it had earned. On the other side, the gap against competitors who kept selling beef bowls made with Australian or Chinese beef showed up in customer counts and in results, and the distance opened over that period was not easily closed.

What remained was not only the beef bowl. The menu mix assembled during the period when gyudon could not be sold, and the kitchen equipment replaced to match it, gave a network that had been thought saturated on a single item a different kind of reach. Even so, customer numbers never returned to the level of 800 a day per shop, and in a market where the total number of beef-bowl shops had grown, no route remained for simply restoring the old model as it was. When a business concentrates all its value in one item, what does it protect and what does it remake once that item is gone — the two and a half years from 2004 can be seen as the period in which this company gave one answer to that question.