Meet the Japanese noodle billionaire who is going up against KFC and McDonald’s

The 23-year-old Japanese noodle billionaire Takaya Awata opened a small shop in Kakogawa, a city on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, with the little money he had saved. He called it Toridoll Sanban-kan, which means “Toridoll store No. 3.” It was a promise to himself that he would soon own three restaurants, since he had already promised himself that he would soon open shops one and two.

After forty years, Japanese noodle billionaire Awata’s Tokyo-listed Toridoll Holdings has 21 names of nearly 2,000 quick-service restaurants in 28 countries and regions. This is Marugame Seimen, which is Japan’s biggest udon noodle chain in terms of both sales and number of stores. His success with fast food has made him a billionaire and helped him focus on what he wants to do.

Growth Sales

At his headquarters in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, the 62-year-old president and CEO says, “I want Toridoll to compete on a global scale.” He also says that he wants the company to make ¥1 trillion ($7 billion) in sales in the next ten years. To reach those high goals, Awata wants Toridoll to focus on growing its business overseas instead of relying on diners in Japan, where the restaurant market is shrinking.

Tommaso Nastasi, a partner at the consulting company Deloitte in Milan, says by email that the global quick-service restaurant market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 5% between 2019 and 2023, reaching more than $1 trillion. This makes it the fastest-growing part of the food-service market as a whole. But in Japan, where the population is getting older, there are fewer full-time jobs, and pay have stayed the same, restaurant owners also have to deal with rising costs and a lack of workers.

Deal with American Giants

Awata also says that the food business in the country is very competitive. To grow in Japan, you would have to take market share away from competitors like Hanamaru, a local udon chain owned by the more than 100-year-old beef-bowl giant Yoshinoya Holdings, and Tokyo-listed Zensho Holdings, which is best known for its cheap Sukiya beef-bowl chain and was started by another billionaire, Kentaro Ogawa. Japanese noodle Billionaire Toridoll also has to deal with American giants like KFC and McDonald’s, which have more than 4,000 shops in Japan between them.

Even so, Toridoll made a record ¥232 billion in sales in the most recent fiscal year, which finished in March. 38% of that came from outside of Japan, thanks in part to a rise in tourists. The net profit went up 48% to ¥5.7 billion, thanks to a weaker yen that made it easier for profits from foreign branches to be sent back to Japan. But Toridoll’s shares have dropped 5% in the last year. Before the pandemic, they were selling at high earnings multiples as people started going out to eat again. Recently, Awata’s net worth was $1.1 billion. He became a billionaire last year and is now one of Japan’s 50 Richest People.

Net Profit Japanese Noodle Billionaire

Toridoll wants its net profit to more than triple by March 2028, with ¥420 billion in sales, almost half of which will come from outside of Japan. To do this, he says, the number of stores needs to more than double, to 4,900, with 3,000 of those being foreign branches. (The company owns all but four of its nearly 1,100 stores in the United States. Half of its 861 stores abroad are run as franchises or joint ventures.) Awata says that in the next three to five years, he thinks that income from outside of Japan will be higher, closer to 60%.

Restaurant Chains

The Nikkei newspaper said in a report released in June that 44% of Japanese restaurant owners with locations outside of Japan plan to open more. This is up from 28% in the previous poll, which came out last year. Zensho, for instance, wants to open 1,450 new stores by March of next year. More than 90% of these will be abroad. Food & Life Companies, based in Osaka and best known for its Akindo Sushiro sushi brand with more than 1,100 restaurants in Asia, came to the U.S. in April.

Japanese noodle billionaire Awata, on the other hand, is sure that he knows how to be successful. He says, “We’ve given a lot of thought to how to get people to come in.” “We try to give them moments that make them say, ‘That looks good.’”

Struggle

It wasn’t easy for Wata to become a trader and join the three-comma club. When he was 13, his father died. It was his mother who raised him in Sakaide, a city in Kagawa region. He quit Kobe City University of Foreign Studies to help support his family. It was while working at a coffee shop that he found his true calling. He remembers, “I loved cooking, serving food to people, and hearing them say how good it was.”

Awata wanted to save money to open his own restaurant, so he became a truck driver, which was the best job he could find. He worked 24 hours a day and slept in a room at work. He says that things were bad in his life, but the friendly setting of a nearby grilled chicken stand helped him feel better. It made him want to open his own yakitori restaurant, which he and his wife ran. Awata says the name Toridoll is just a choice that was easy for him to remember.

At the end of the 1990s, the young restaurant owner got a new idea when he went to Marugame in Kagawa, the hometown of his late father. The town is famous for its Sanuki udon, which is made from locally grown wheat, salt, and water. People waited in line for a long time to get noodles from one udon stand that cooked them right in front of them. This led to the opening of the first Marugame Seimen in Kakogawa in 2000. In Japanese, seimen means “noodle maker.”

Japanese noodle Billionaire Akaya Takaya writes

“Getting the value of the experience across is the most important thing.”

CEO of Toridoll is Takaya Awata

Bird flu spread through Asia in 2004 and hurt sales at Awata’s dozens of yakitori shops. He had to give up his plans for an IPO because of this. He changed his mind and put all of his energy into growing the udon businesses. He started with a cheap noodle stand in a food court and then added stands for ramen and stir-fried noodles when he realized that by giving more food options, he could double or even triple his sales in the same place.

He used bank debt and cash flow to pay for most of this growth until the business was big enough to go public in 2006. By that time, he had 100 Marugame Seimen stores. He says, “If the bird flu outbreak hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have grown this much. It feels like that failure led to a big success.”

Japanese noodle billionaire Awata got the idea to go global from a trip to Hawaii in 2009. Seeing all the tourists there inspired him to open his first restaurant outside of Japan. Awata says that the Marugame Udon store in Waikiki, which opened in 2011, makes more than ¥100 million a month in sales, more than any other store in his chain of restaurants around the world.

Starting in 2015, he spent more than ¥9 billion buying businesses. That year, he bought Wok To Walk in the Netherlands because of the long lines outside its restaurants. The next year, he bought a 49% stake in the company that ran Malaysia’s Boat Noodle chain. The next year, he bought Banpaiya bars and Zundo-ya ramen shops in Japan. And finally, in 2018, he bought a 70% stake in MC Group, the company that ran Monster Curry in Singapore.