The fryer I could not repair

The first fryer I could not repair belonged to a tempura restaurant in Sannomiya. It was eleven years old, its owner was nearly seventy, and its temperature controller had been out of production for four years. I was twenty-three and had driven there after midnight with a van full of parts that did not fit. The owner bought a new fryer the following week, paying for a machine when its frame, burners and oil pan were still sound. I have thought about that night in most of the product reviews I have chaired since.

I studied mechanical engineering at Hirakane Institute of Technology, finishing in March 1994, and joined Nadakaze Kitchen Service in Kobe the following month. Nadakaze installed and serviced equipment from several manufacturers across Hyogo and Osaka. Nine months after I started, the Great Hanshin earthquake struck, and much of my second year was spent reconnecting and testing gas equipment in kitchens being rebuilt. Over six years I repaired fryers, dishwashers, ice machines and rice cookers in hotels, hospitals and family restaurants. A dealer engineer meets a product after the sales conversation has ended. I learnt which parts cooks removed for cleaning, which seals failed when staff hosed equipment down, and why a wiring diagram taped inside a panel mattered more than a printed manual in an office drawer.

Kamadosei recruited me in October 2000 as a field-quality engineer, partly because I had been one of its harsher dealer critics. I analysed service reports and returned parts, and I built the company's first table linking each spare part to the products that used it and to the date its supply would end. The table showed how often a small redesign had stranded older equipment. I also sat in field-action reviews, where our quality-assurance director decided whether a fault warranted an inspection campaign. I learnt to separate a nuisance from a hazard, and to write a customer notice that a busy kitchen manager would read to the end.

In 2005 I became product manager for continuous rice-cooking lines and rotary kettles, the machines at the centre of school-lunch centres and large central kitchens. Municipalities and contract caterers buy them through formal tenders, and the tender documents rewarded output per hour and floor area. I spent days in the centres themselves. The crews were already older than our specifications assumed, and the loading station was the position nobody volunteered for.

From 2011 to 2016 I was deputy managing director for product and engineering at our Thai subsidiary, which assembles equipment in Chonburi province. We adapted the range for Southeast Asian hotels, Japanese restaurant groups operating abroad and local caterers. Our variants needed burners set for bottled gas, components rated for greater heat and humidity, and programmes for jasmine and glutinous rice. I learnt to refuse distributors who wanted a domestic model shipped with an adapter, and to place trained service engineers in a country before selling there.

I returned to Osaka in 2016 as general manager of product planning. Dealers were reporting that customers retired equipment for want of a single board, and care-home kitchens were asking for controls their staff could use without training. I changed the planning process so that every product brief began with the people who would clean and repair the machine, and so that service-parts engineers signed each brief alongside the designers.

I became Chief Product Officer in April 2021, an executive officer reporting to our president. I present product strategy, major development spending and field-safety matters to the board of directors, but I am not a director. My work covers the portfolio, a development budget of ¥2.4 billion, certification for each market and the commitments we make about parts and data. The cases on this site describe three of those commitments. In each I had to persuade colleagues with sound reasons to disagree: a sales director with a tender to bid, a purchasing team with a cheaper component and a president who wanted a connected product on the market.

The people I design for rarely sign the order. They are the cook lifting a pan before dawn, the dealer engineer called out at midnight and the kitchen manager who must show an inspector a temperature record. A product officer earns their trust by making equipment that serves them honestly for a long time, and by saying clearly where a machine stops and their own judgement begins.

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