Agenda - 10-15-2013 - 6a - Laserfiche WebLink

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I Attachment #4 had limited access to confectionery products, and sugar consumption in general remained low. Milk and milk products were also absent from the Japanese diet. The opening of the country's borders stimulated interest in all things foreign, and the country's growing foreign population encouraged the import of Western -style confectionery and candy. Taichiro Morinaga recognized that the growing foreign influence in Japan, and the country's readiness to adopt attributes of Western culture, would inevitably extend to the country's eating habits. Morinaga became determined to learn the art of candy making, in order to introduce new confectionery products to the Japanese market. Despite the anti -Asian prejudice, Morinaga found a job as a janitor at a candy factory, and there learned how to make candy. By the end of the century, Morinaga was ready to return to Japan and start his own candy company. Before leaving, Morinaga performed his own bit of market research, questioning members of San Francisco's Japanese community and other Japanese visitors to the city on their candy preferences. Morinaga discovered that the sweet most preferred by the people he questioned was marshmallows, at the time also known as "angel food." The fluffy, egg white - and - sugar -based candy also resembled existing Japanese confections, making it a natural first product. Morinaga founded his business with partner Hanzaburo Matsuzaki in 1899, opening a small shop in the Akasaka neighborhood of Tokyo. The business, called Morinaga Western Candy Confectionery, developed quickly as the country eagerly greeted the new candy type. Morinaga himself acted as salesman, pushing a cart from which he sold marshmallows, and other Western - styled cakes and candies. Among these were caramels. This product represented even more of a novelty in Japan in that it contained butter - -at a time when dairy products still had not penetrated the Japanese diet. Morinaga's caramel sales were at first limited to his foreign customers, as the Japanese shied away from the strange product. In addition, the country's climate made it difficult to produce - -and to eat -- caramel, which tended to melt and become too sticky to hold in the heat and humidity. Morinaga set out to develop a new caramel recipe for the Japanese market, and by 1914 had perfected a recipe that both appealed to the Japanese palate and also offered a longer shelf life. The new product debuted in 1914, and was packaged in a pocket -sized yellow box. Known as Hi -Chew, the product became a company flagship and one of its core products into the next century. In the meantime, the company's strong marshmallow sales inspired the adoption of a logo, an angel, in 1905 - -the angel logo also fit in with Morinaga's work as a missionary. The company adopted the name Morinaga Confectionery Inc. in 1912. The success of Hi -Chew led Morinaga to seek its own source of dairy products, and in 1917 the company set up a dairy operation, which became Morinaga Dairy Industries. A year later, the company launched a new candy line, becoming the first to introduce the chocolate bar to Japan. Meanwhile, the company began extending its dairy product line, launching its first powdered baby formula in 1920. That launch marked the start of the company's involvement in the nutritional products category as well. By the 1920s, Morinaga's sales had been growing steadily. To meet the rising demand, the company installed its first production machinery -- previously, production had been by hand - -and launched mass production in 1925. Over the next decades, the company continued to add to its production capacity, opening four more plants, and adopting increasingly sophisticated, modernized production techniques. By the 1980s, the company manufacturing operations had become fully automated. Q7