Consumer History | Kikkoman — Eight Family Vats Written as Noda Shoyu on 7 December

People treat Kikkoman as a Noda listing that always sold a dispenser-cap bottle and a California brew from a Chiba book.

The first corporate book was eight brewing houses on one register.

On 7 December 1917 the Mogi, Takanashi, and Horikiri families merged eight soy-sauce shops as Noda Shoyu Co., Ltd. in Noda, Chiba. The families had brewed on the Edo River since the seventeenth century and shipped casks downriver to Edo.

Noda already held the largest Kanto output. The merger put that output under one set of vats and one freight book. The Kikkoman mark, one of several house brands, became the single national name in 1940. The company took the brand as its own name in 1964.

A San Francisco sales office opened in 1957. Bottling in the United States followed.

The mechanism is still the first one.

A common brew and a common cask let a Kanto house fill Tokyo shops without eight competing labels on the same barge. Whoever owned the vat owned the next season.

A visitor at 250 Noda still walks past the brewery town that named the book. The eight separate shops are gone. The 1917 register is where the listed house started.

Photo: Noda streetscape, Wikimedia Commons contributors, via Wikimedia Commons.