He shows no trace now of the samurai cowboy screaming into the TV camera. Yoshida is every inch the businessman -- solemn, crisp, and formidable.
Yoshida moves through the plant with a capo's strut, pausing here to greet a longtime employee, there to question a manager about water spilling over the lip of a monstrous vat. He shows no trace of the samurai cowboy screaming into the TV camera. Yoshida is every inch the businessman -- solemn, crisp, and formidable in an expensive gray suit, his face an impassive mask.
He climbs a set of stairs to a catwalk overlooking the floor, surveying this slice of his kingdom with a satisfaction tinged by wistfulness: He has only a sketchy understanding of the factory's engineering and operations, he acknowledges. And the sauce itself, while bearing Yoshida's name and likeness, is no longer entirely his; five years ago, he sold North American trademark, distribution, and marketing rights to the H.J. Heinz Co., for which he essentially serves as a contract manufacturer. This arrangement falls under the aegis of Yoshida Foods International, another one of the companies that make up the privately held Yoshida Group, which last year took in more than $180 million in sales.
"Economy of scale," he says, with a stoical toss of his hand. "Pretty soon, there only be four grocery outlets left in this country -- Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger, Costco. To play with those big boys, you better be big yourself."
The capital-intensive roar and high-corporate filigree seem a world apart from a 20-gallon pot of sauce simmering on the stove in the basement of a karate dojo. And the austere and sober businessman touring his factory seems a different person from the berserker wearing a pasta mustache at Sur la Table. And yet the distance between the mom-and-pop project and Heinz, or even between the two sides of Yoshida's personality, isn't nearly as great as the one yawning between food manufacturing and the spectral, virtual 21st-century enterprise -- global logistics and supply chain management -- that now constitutes Yoshida's core business.
"Family, relationships," he says, hanging up his haircover and passing back through the looking glass toward his office. "No matter what business you in, no matter how big how small, that's all that count -- family, relationships."
By the late 1980s, after years of furious work and two near bankruptcies, Junki Yoshida's sauces were established as a regional favorite in the Pacific Northwest. He sold through the local supermarket chains, which were then still the backbone of the American grocery industry. Although he still practiced karate, he was a businessman now, with a wide circle of contacts, many of them in positions of power. When the fledgling Costco came courting, these friends urged Yoshida to spurn the advances.
Costco challenged the system by buying directly from producers and manufacturers, cutting out the jobbers and slashing the markups by which the supermarkets prospered. With its membership fee, warehouse stores, limited selection, and oversize packaging, Costco once seemed like a bizarre fad that would soon pass. If Yoshida did business with this upstart, he was warned, he would be blacklisted by the grocery establishment.
It was one of those watershed moments, when an entrepreneur must crunch the numbers, search his soul, and finally close his eyes and make a calamitous or evolutionary leap. Yoshida rejected the advice and gambled on Costco.
Selling through Costco meant reconfiguring his packaging, coding, and pricing, a huge undertaking for what was still essentially a mom-and-pop operation. But the basic nature of the business remained unchanged -- selling the sauce. At the time, the Costco chain consisted of only two stores, in Seattle and Portland. Each weekend for months, Junki and Linda would shuttle between the stores, hammering out the demos. To say that Yoshida was an effective salesman is like saying that Bob Dylan is a good songwriter.
"Junki reinvented the whole concept of demos," says Costco founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. "Before -- and for the most part since -- demos consisted of little old ladies handing out free samples, and the customer gobbling up the freebie and then looking for a place to get rid of the plastic fork. Well, Junki just blew that out of the water. He put on a show. He created traffic jams in the aisles. Most important, he wouldn't let a customer get away without a flat of sauce in her shopping cart."
"To my mind, marketing and sales are connected, two sides of same coin," Yoshida says. "I never understand why they separate. I think that a big problem with corporate world today. In my company, marketing people always sell."
At Costco, Linda cooked and served while Junki worked the crowd, doing his gonzo samurai routine, dancing, singing, yelling out "Hey, mama-san" to shoppers, donning cowboy hats, throwing lassoes, brandishing butcher knives, on one occasion even chasing a stubborn shopper out into the parking lot and escorting her back into the store to buy his sauce.
The shows were a hit, the sauce flew out of the stores, and Sinegal and Yoshida forged a lasting bond. Costco grew exponentially, and Yoshida hooked on for the ride. When Costco staged a grand opening of a store anywhere in America, the Yoshidas served as headliners. And when an outlet opened in England in 1993, Linda and Junki took their act to Europe.
Yoshida eventually reached another crossroads. The next step for his rapidly growing business was to sell through the mega-supermarket chains at a national level. But that required a capital investment -- chiefly in the form of fees for placement on supermarket shelves -- beyond the scope of his company. Yoshida had to either go public or sell the distribution and marketing rights to his sauce. He chose the latter, selling to Heinz in 2000. At around the same time, Yoshida's other business interests were starting to bear fruit.
