Company Information
An Introduction to the Dressings Factory of Fundokin Shoyu Co., Ltd.
- New factory completed in June, 1999, with a production capacity of 5,300 kl
- In 2015, production capacity reached 7,200 kl with 18 million bottles of 80 different items, and sales reached 4 billion yen
Factory Grounds: 43,000 m2
Factory building area: 4,700m2, Floor area: 12,100 m2, Total construction costs: 3 billion yen
Number of employees: 80 (33 in the 1st Manufacturing Division, 34 in the 2nd Manufacturing Division, 5 in the Quality Control Division, and 8 in the Administration Division)
Production capacity: 7,200 kl in 18 million bottles for 80 different items, with sales of 4 billion yen
Development Concept
It has been 30 years since we at Fundokin Shoyu developed our first dressing. You may ask why a miso and soy sauce manufacturer turned to dressing production. The reason is that our customers were asking us to make a Japanese-style dressing with the flavors of soy sauce. It was a much greater task than simply adding soy sauce to vinegar and oil, and we developed several test products in our efforts to create a delicious, soy sauce-based dressing. We were finally able to develop a Japanese-style dressing which combined pure soy sauce with the flavors of raw onions in a way that preserved the distinct taste of our soy sauce.
We also made sure that the fresh flavor of the raw onions was kept by sorting and peeling them by hand and removing any damaged onions.
Our fastest onion peelers could peel 20 onions in a minute, or one onion every 3 seconds. On average our workers can peel 15 onions per minute, a rate of one onion every 4 seconds.
We use onions from Hokkaido from October through May, and onions from Kyushu from June through September.
Factory Environment
The water holding tanks at our factory are made of wood, and each one has a capacity of 50 tons (with a diameter of 4.7 meters and a height of 4.1 meters). At Fundokin Shoyu’s soy sauce factory, these tanks are used for the fermentation of soy sauce, but at this factory they are used to hold water.
There are many examples of wooden water holding tanks being used in Japan and around the world. As some of the larger tanks, in Haneda Airport, in 1992 4 tanks with a capacity of 400 tons each were installed along with 2 tanks of 350 tons each at its No.2 Terminal. In 2009 an additional 2 tanks of 400 tons each were installed at the International Terminal. Wooden water tanks have also been used at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel since 1981, and were renewed in 2009 to 2 tanks of 225 tons each. Across the globe in New York City, over 10,000 wooden tanks are installed atop the city’s many high-rise buildings. New Yorkers came to rely on them as the temperature in New York drops below freezing in the winter, and wooden tanks do not freeze, while conventional water tanks do freeze which means they cannot be used.
Wood as a material has notably superior insulating properties, and water from a wooden tank will taste cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Over the past 10 years, sesame dressing has become immensely popular, and currently almost 50% of our factory’s production is dedicated to sesame dressing. The remainder is divided between soy sauce dressing (40%) and other flavors such as Yuzu citrus and pepper, corn, and basil (10% combined).
The sesame dressing we make at our factory is popular with our customers because it was developed to bring out the fresh, deeply-roasted flavors of sesame. It blends a mild tartness with the rich aromas of sesame.
The dressings we manufacture at this factory use ingredients such as onions, sesame, and soy sauce that have been carefully-selected to bring out the best flavors, and are produced by hand in a tradition of craftsmanship combined with fully-automated bottling and packaging systems. It is in this way we pursue the highest-quality products to satisfy all of our customers.
