Year to March 2026; commercial and institutional kitchen equipment
Product-division colleagues
212
Planning, design, certification and service-parts engineering
Repair-parts period after production
10 years
Five core product families, extended from seven years in 2022
A commercial kitchen tests a product at six in the morning, with a short crew, wet floors and a lunch service that cannot move. The people who load, clean and repair our equipment are getting older, and many of our customers are too. I want each product decision judged in that kitchen, and by the dealer engineer called to it years later, rather than by the specification sheet that sold it.
I design kitchen equipment for the person who will lift, clean and repair it in its tenth year, and I state plainly what a machine cannot do for them.
I am Chief Product Officer and an executive officer of Kamadosei Kitchen Equipment, an Osaka manufacturer of fryers, rotary kettles, continuous rice-cooking lines, combination steam ovens and conveyor dishwashers for commercial and institutional kitchens. The company is listed on the Standard Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and its founding family holds about thirty-one per cent. In the year to March 2026 we reported ¥48.6 billion of revenue and ¥3.1 billion of operating profit; exports and our Thai plant provide nineteen per cent of sales. I lead 212 colleagues in product planning, design engineering, industrial design, certification and service-parts engineering. Manufacturing and sales report elsewhere; I answer for what we decide to build and for the promises attached to it.
I started in 1994 as a field service engineer for a Kobe dealer, repairing other manufacturers' equipment as well as ours, usually after the last service of the night. That work taught me which parts a cook removes forty times a day, which boards fail in a humid dish room and how often a sound fryer was scrapped for one missing component. I joined Kamadosei in 2000 to work on field quality and spare parts, then managed our institutional rice and kettle products, and spent five years in Thailand adapting the range for kitchens with different gas, power, rice and heat.
Our customers' kitchens are changing faster than our catalogue. School-lunch centres and care-home kitchens recruit staff in their sixties and seventies; many small restaurants are run by owners of the same age; more cooks read Japanese as a second language. The three decisions described here each gave something up for that reality: output per hour, a cheaper controller and a restaurant-chain tender. I set out the disagreements as they happened, including what I would now handle differently.
A lower loading point cost a tenth of the line's output
We lowered the rice line's loading height from 1,050 to 820 millimetres and cut a loaded pan from 13 to 9 kilograms. Hourly output fell from 3,600 to 3,250 servings, and we lost two municipal tenders worth about ¥390 million.
Ten years of repair parts instead of seven
For five core product families we extended parts availability after the end of production and kept a dearer controller with a longer supply commitment. Each unit now costs ¥2,900 more, and parts inventory rose by ¥260 million.
A connected oven launched four months late
We held our connected combination oven until its temperature record showed network gaps and readings taken without an inserted probe. A chain's tender for 180 ovens, worth about ¥560 million, went to a competitor.
Current focus
I am redesigning the control panels across our fryer and dishwasher ranges so that the three most frequent actions sit in the same place on every model, carry pictograms beside the Japanese text and can be read from a step away without glasses.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one outside-director role at a Japanese manufacturer that neither competes with nor supplies Kamadosei, with about twenty-four days a year available once my employer has approved it under its rules on outside roles.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of engineering in mechanical engineeringHirakane Institute of Technology · 1994
Keiko was the engineer who came back the next morning to find out why a part had failed, not just to replace it. Twenty years later she still asks our engineers that question before she asks them anything else.
Takuma IwasebeService manager, Nadakaze Kitchen ServiceThe full record ↗
Contact
I would consider one outside-director role at a Japanese manufacturer that neither competes with nor supplies Kamadosei, with about twenty-four days a year available once my employer has approved it under its rules on outside roles.