Consumer History | Ajinomoto — The Kyobashi Lot Where Umami Went on Sale
· 1909-5
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Consumer History | Ajinomoto — The Kyobashi Lot Where Umami Went on Sale
kevin
People treat Ajinomoto as a Kyobashi tower that was always a global seasoning company.
The first product left this district as a bottled powder from a pharmacist's firm.
In 1908 Kikunae Ikeda, a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University, isolated glutamic acid from kombu dashi and named the taste umami. He filed a Japanese patent on 24 April 1908 for a seasoning whose main component was glutamate. The patent issued on 25 July 1908.
Saburosuke Suzuki II ran Suzuki Pharmaceutical Works, an iodine business that already knew how to work seaweed. He took Ikeda's method into production.
On 20 May 1909 the first bottles of AJI-NO-MOTO, the world's first commercial umami seasoning, went on sale. The Ajinomoto Group still counts that day as its founding date.
In November 1909 the firm moved its Ajinomoto honpo office to a three-storey building at Minami-denma-cho 1-12, Kyobashi-ku, on the same city block as the present headquarters at 1-15-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku.
The 1909 building burned in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923. A rebuilt two-storey honpo opened on the same ground in 1925, the year the company was incorporated.
The mechanism is industrial chemistry applied to a kitchen. Ikeda wanted cheaper protein flavor in the Japanese diet. Suzuki wanted a product he could bottle. Glutamate, extracted and then synthesized, is what they sold.
The present Ajinomoto Headquarters Building stands on that Kyobashi lot. The public pin is the sidewalk. The laboratories and the first filling rooms are not open as a museum.
What a walker can still test is the claim the bottle made in 1909: a measured amino acid, not a secret stock, is the taste.
Photo: Musashi Seiryo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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