COMPANY

- About Us -

"We want to create beautiful food."

As the food service industry has grown rapidly alongside the development of food culture, we have established ourselves as a specialized manufacturer of commercial plastic cutting boards and kitchen tools, consistently supplying products that meet industry needs to markets across Japan. Well known through industry publications such as Monthly School Lunch, Modern Dining, and Specialty Cuisine, our flagship products include the iconic peelable layered cutting board, antibacterial cutting boards suited for a variety of uses, and kitchen tools such as pressed sushi molds, hand-roll sushi molds, and rice ball molds. We are committed to expanding our product lineup to make cooking more convenient, and we welcome inquiries and proposals from those interested in purchasing or distributing our products, as well as those with great ideas to share.

PROFILE

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Company Name	Yamaken Co., Ltd.
Established	June 17, 1972 (Founded: March 1, 1958)
Representative	President & CEO: Bruce Park & Kazuhiro Yamaken
Location	5-2-22 Shimonomachi, Kojima, Kurashiki, Okayama
Business	Manufacture and sale of plastic cutting boards, kitchen tools, commercial kitchen equipment, and sundry goods
Capital	¥30,000,000

Our Founding Story

The company's founder, Akihiro Yamaken, had been working in the kimono trade around 1957 before turning to the manufacture and sale of collar stiffeners for school uniforms, a local industry in his hometown of Kojima.

Through his visits to garment manufacturers, he noticed that the cutting tables used for school uniforms were made of wood, which suffered heavy damage from chisel cuts and had to be replaced constantly with new boards. This led him to the idea that switching to plastic would improve durability and create demand. He proposed the idea to a garment manufacturer, and the product sold explosively, earning considerable profit for a time.

However, as cutting technology advanced and electric cutters replaced traditional hand chisels, demand for the plastic cutting tables plummeted.

He then turned his attention to cutting the same plastic sheets into cutting boards for kitchen use. At the time, wooden cutting boards were taken for granted, but by rethinking the material, he saw that plastic would produce no splinters, would be durable and hygienic, and would likely find a market. When he brought the product to market, the response exceeded all expectations and contributed significantly to sales growth.

Next, his wife Shizuko Yamaken developed what would become the company's defining product: the layered peelable cutting board. By stacking several thin plastic sheets and heat-sealing the edges, she created a board where the worn outer layer could simply be peeled away and discarded, leaving a fresh surface underneath, and lasting many times longer than a single-layer board. She developed the product, filed for and received the patent (as inventor and applicant), and brought it to market, dramatically improving the company's performance and laying the foundation for its growth today.

Akihiro then found another innovation in the scraps left over from cutting the plastic sheets. Using those offcuts as raw material, he devised a rice ball mold, marking the company's entry into the kitchen tool business.

To explore whether the plastic sheets could be manufactured in-house, he experimented with melting polyethylene pellets (small pill-like granules) in a Teflon-coated home frying pan, researching optimal pellet shape, melting temperature, and release from the pan. After trial and error, he succeeded in developing a prototype and identified a path to mass production.

He then built a kiln of his own design, a Teflon-coated cast iron (SS400) furnace to melt and form the material, establishing an integrated production system that brought part of the sheet manufacturing in-house.

In this way, Akihiro and Shizuko laid the foundation for everything the company is today. The production systems they built, the technical knowledge and know-how they created, and every new product they developed came entirely from their own abilities, without imitating any other company. As a result, the two of them became the first people in Japan to manufacture plastic cutting boards and kitchen tools.

After that, the business expanded rapidly, including the construction of a factory for in-house pellet melting.

Today, the kitchen goods industry is dominated by major primary wholesalers, but in those early days, before distribution channels were established, many wholesalers from across Japan approached the company requesting to carry its products. The house brand "Yamaken" and associated product identifiers became well known throughout the industry.

The brand's recognition grew in large part due to the founder's innovative ideas and outstanding technical development. At the same time, the following sales strategies proved equally effective in driving that recognition.

Having invented Japan's first plastic cutting board and secured the patent for the peelable layered board, the couple had no customers at all. To break into the market, Akihiro reasoned that end users such as fishmongers and restaurants would inevitably visit fish markets to stock up, so he rented space under the eaves of fish markets across Japan and sold directly to those customers for cash, much like a street vendor.

Since end users arrived at the markets around 5:00 a.m., he would stake out his spot starting around 3:00 a.m. Rather than staying at an inn, he often slept in the truck loaded with cutting boards, averaging about three hours of sleep a night.

In short, having made the product but having no customers, he went wherever end users gathered and ran the business like a festival stall. This persistence, combined with the novel idea of replacing wood with plastic and the patent on the peelable board, eventually led to kitchen goods shops inside the fish markets requesting to sell his plastic cutting boards.

Word then spread to the primary and secondary wholesalers who frequented those shops, who came to request business as well, growing the customer base and establishing the foundation for credit-based trade.

Akihiro had initially approached almost no wholesalers himself, largely because he was unfamiliar with how distribution channels in the kitchen goods industry worked.

Though he had no formal business education, the sales strategy he put into practice turned out to be a textbook example of what is now called a "push strategy," and it is worthy of recognition. He subsequently ran continuous advertising in newspapers and industry publications and on television, layering in a "pull strategy" as well. Through the combined effect of technological innovation (intellectual property acquisition), new product development, and an original approach to channel development and sales, the foundation for the company's dramatic growth was built through their combined effect.

Company History