Playback ’15] From about 140 to 15 restaurants in 2 years… Why “Tokyo Chikara Meshi”‘s breakthrough was over in an instant.

What did “FRIDAY” report 10, 20, or 30 years ago? In “Playback Friday,” we revisit the topics that were hot at the time. This time, we introduce the article “Tokyo Chikara Meshi: Sharp Decline from 140 to 15 Restaurants in 2 Years, What Went Wrong” from the June 5, 2003 issue, 10 years ago.

Tokyo Chikara Meshi” is a beef bowl chain that opened its first store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, in June 2011, soon after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and was named in the hope of “bringing power to Japan from Tokyo. Its signature dish, yaki-gyudon (grilled beef bowl), became so popular that the number of stores surged. …… The article looks at the reasons for the slowdown. All ages and titles are current as of the time of the article).

Where was the bustle when the store first opened?

The magazine reported the following about the stalling of the store.

We aim to open 1,000 restaurants!

In June 2011, “Tokyo Chikara Meshi” bravely entered the world of gyudon (beef bowl) restaurants, hoping to become the “4th pole” following Yoshinoya, Matsuya, and Sukiya. Minoru Hirabayashi, then president of Sanko Marketing Foods Co.

There is no lizard’s eye view of the momentum that existed at that time. The restaurant, which was supposed to have expanded at an unusually rapid pace to approximately 140 stores in just two years or so, is now in a catastrophic situation with only 12 directly managed stores and 3 franchise stores.

This reporter visited one of the restaurants in Tokyo during lunch time on a weekday, but the restaurant was never full and was not as busy as it was when it first opened. What happened to Tokyo Chikara Meji?

Sanko Foods, which Mr. Hirabayashi raised in his own lifetime, had achieved great success with such izakaya chains as “Toho Mimonroku” and “Kin no Kura Jr. However, the izakaya market eventually reached a plateau, and Mr. Hirabayashi took the lead in launching “Tokyo Chikara Meshi,” the culmination of his 40 years in the restaurant business.

The restaurant’s specialty is “yaki-gyudon” (grilled beef bowl). The beef bowl is made of thinly sliced beef coated with a thick, sweet and spicy sauce and grilled in a special roaster. It was a novel product that overturned the conventional wisdom of the three major beef bowl makers that beef bowls should be boiled. The initial price was a whopping 280 yen (ordinary price). The yaki-gyudon quickly became very popular.

Sanko Foods also took a big gamble in order to survive in the hyper-competitive beef bowl market. The company tried to imprint the image of “Tokyo Chikara Meshi” on its customers through a dominant strategy of opening a large number of stores in a specific area. The chain expanded rapidly, and in September 2012, only one year and three months after the first store opened, the 100th store, the Umegaoka store in Setagaya, opened.

However, the chain gradually began to show some signs of falling apart. One of the problems was that the “yaki” in “yaki gyudon” (grilled beef bowl) became a flaw.

The cost of rapid expansion has also surfaced.

Unlike regular beef bowls, grilled beef bowls cannot be made in advance. Unlike regular beef bowls, yaki-gyudon cannot be prepared in advance and takes a long time to be served, making customers wait. The smoke from the oil emitted during the grilling process also makes the restaurants dirty.

Moreover, due to the rapid expansion, the store managers had to be quickly trained. Store management was difficult.

The kitchen can be seen from the seats, but it lacked a sense of cleanliness, with meat that had fallen out of the bowl being put back in with bare hands and the serving style being messy,” said food analyst Takao Shigemori.

During the year from July 2012, 60 new restaurants were opened, but 18 were closed. Although the company seemed to be sailing smoothly with over 100 stores, it was in fact undergoing such a slow expansion.

In fact, the company’s taste was also a problem.

In the beginning, they used rice produced in China, which was very bad. The restaurant changed the rice in an effort to improve the taste, but the image of the rice became firmly entrenched. The meat itself, in my personal impression, was greasy and smelled burnt. ……” (Yagyu Kyubei, a researcher on cheap and delicious gourmet food)

In addition, a major player began to strike back. Yoshinoya and Matsuya launched competing products one after another: “Beef Yakiniku Donburi” by Yoshinoya and “Karubi Yakiniku Gyumeshi” by Matsuya, respectively. Sanko Foods found itself in a difficult situation. The company even tried selling “Nigiru Gyudon” at some of its stores. From July to December 2001, the company closed 67 stores. Finally, in June ’14, the company changed its policy to concentrate its management resources on izakaya (Japanese style pubs). The company decided to sell 68 stores, or 80% of its total stores at the time, to the Mac Group, which operates karaoke and other businesses.

The Mac side, which inherited many of the stores, established a company called Chikara Meshi and began operating it, but they must have seen the limits of this brand. Chikkarameshi is just the name of the company, and the stores it bought were converted into ramen restaurants such as Ichikakuya.’ By May 2003, the company-operated Tokyo Chikara Meshi had disappeared.

By May 2003, Tokyo Chikara Meji had disappeared, leaving only 15 restaurants operated by Sanko Foods. It was no small feat to survive the fierce competition in the “national food” beef bowl market.

’24, the first new restaurant in Tokyo in 10 years.

The development of “Tokyo Chikara Meshi” stores came too soon. (SANKO), which changed its name to SANKO MARKETING FOODS in 2009, described the situation at that time in the Mainichi Newspaper on November 18, 2010.

On average, we were opening three stores every two weeks. Then, it was very difficult to properly train three store managers in two weeks.

The number of stores, which was 15 in May ’15, continued to decline further.’ In October 2011, the Kamagaya store, the only store in the Kanto region at the time, was closed. The Osaka Nihonbashi store in Osaka City became the only store in Japan.

On the other hand, in the COVID-19 crisis of ’21, the company opened four stores in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and other cities as part of its overseas licensing business. In May last year, “Tokyo Chikara Meshoku Shokudo” opened in Tokyo’s Kudan No. 2 Government Building, the first new restaurant in Japan in 10 years. As the name implies, the restaurant is the “cafeteria” of the government building and offers menu items other than “yaki-gyudon” (grilled beef bowl). With the COVID-19 crisis, SANKO is scaling back its izakaya business and focusing on the government cafeteria business. As part of this effort, a cafeteria in collaboration with the “Tokyo Chikara Meshi” brand appears to have been created.

The cafeteria is open to the public, and on the first and second days of its opening, some 30 people lined up before the store opened for the “grilled beef bowl” of yesteryear. The restaurant may be gone, but the ardent fans have not forgotten the taste.