<Begin Segment 24>

SY: So eight years, you really started from nothing basically.

FK: Yes, and so we split up the profit and we all went our way and then so I had nothing to do because I sold the business and then in 1975 I had also started a noodle business, a yakisoba business, 1975, very small, and we made egg roll skin, won ton skin, and gyoza skin as well. And that was slowly getting bigger and bigger and so we sold the JAC Creative Foods, JAC is J A C. J for Japan, my contingents from Japan, A for Alabama and C for California so that was JAC Creative Foods.

SY: And that was strictly surimi?

FK: That was strictly surimi.

SY: I see, you sold that business.

FK: Now I have time so I said I'm going to help the flavor business which is yakisoba business and so my partner and I we bought an old bakery, the Barbara Ann Bakery right off the Pasadena Freeway.

SY: Oh, my gosh that's the building you're in now.

FK: Yes, so that was a sixty thousand square feet building and now we've outgrown that and we're remodeling another building, a seventy-five thousand square feet building which we hope to be moving into by next year. But anyway, we started there and so when we sold that business my national sales manager which happened to be my sister-in-law, Sachi's younger sister, she couldn't cope with the corporate structure so she quit and she came and says, "Give me a job," and so I said, "Okay, let's do it again." So I gave her ten years to introduce yakisoba to the United States. So we changed the name from "yakisoba" to "stir fry noodle," and today we are all over the United States and it's a very interesting business. It's a business where our product is very inexpensive as compared to other things like meats and things like that. It's a wheat product, so we make noodles, so when times are good... or when times are bad business is okay, when times are good people that like the pasta anyway, would eat pasta, so it's a good, good business to be in.

SY: Is it more like a fresh noodle?

FK: Yeah, we sell it two ways. We sell the fresh yakisoba stir fry noodle and we sell the frozen.

SY: So no dried?

FK: No, we don't dry it because that's adding... that's taking away from the benefit of having something ready to eat. If we dried it we'd go through another process which is completely against my philosophy of business. When you start off with ten pounds and you add water to it to make it thirteen or fourteen pounds and now that's a business. When you get something like the senbei business or a business where... beef jerky business where you start off with ten pounds and you end up with three, your product's got to be expensive. So I've always believed that you got to add water or put air in it to expand it or to increase the weight and this is what we are in. We are in the business of... water business putting water in to sell.

SY: That stir fry noodle idea though was it completely yours?

FK: No, yakisoba has been in existence in Japan for years and it started to sell over here in the Japanese stores and places like that, but there again dealing with one million Nikkei throughout the United States including Hawaii, one million people, that's okay. But like the manju business, where else can you go to sell, if you can have the American people, three hundred fifty million people, if one percent of them say hey, that's pretty good, you got a business.

[Interruption]

SY: You're covering all the Americans, reaching as many Americans as you can.

FK: That's right.

SY: Wow, that's amazing.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.