From Office Fridges to the Tokyo Stock Exchange: KOMPEITO’s Twelve-Year Bet on Workplace Food

On September 11, a company built around a very ordinary object — the office refrigerator — joined the Tokyo Stock Exchange. KOMPEITO Inc. (code 618A) listed on the Growth Market with OFFICE DE YASAI, its “placed healthy office cafeteria” service, at the center of the business. Refrigerators and freezers stocked with salads, side dishes, boxed meals and other foods are installed at workplaces, where employees can buy food when they need it. The company said on listing day that the service had been adopted by more than 6,600 companies nationwide.^{[1] [4]}

That description sounds simple. The operating reality is not. Behind each refrigerator sits a chain of food development, procurement, temperature control, warehousing, delivery, replenishment, payment, inventory management, corporate sales and employee-benefit administration. KOMPEITO’s IPO is therefore more than a story about putting vegetables in offices. It is the public-market debut of a company that has spent twelve years trying to turn workplace food into recurring infrastructure.

It did not start as an office-food company

KOMPEITO was founded in September 2012. Its current IR FAQ says the original plan was an e-commerce business connecting vegetable producers directly with consumers. In February 2013, the company changed course and opened a physical greengrocer in Tokyo’s Azabu-Juban district. Its own corporate history describes sales of only around ¥10,000 on some days and says unsold vegetables were taken to acquaintances’ offices to avoid waste. That practice helped expose a different demand: people wanted convenient food where they worked.^{[5] [6]}

Founder and CEO Shun Watanabe had previously worked in consulting, including supply-chain management — procurement and logistics — for regional manufacturers. The company says he began studying agricultural consulting around 2010 and founded KOMPEITO in 2012 to create new distribution channels and have a larger impact on Japan’s agricultural sector.^[8]

That origin matters. OFFICE DE YASAI was not initially conceived as a fashionable corporate-wellness product. It emerged from a more basic distribution problem: how to create more routes between producers and people who might buy food.

The 2014 lesson: a refrigerator is part of the product

Office test sales began in November 2013, and the company formally launched OFFICE DE YASAI in April 2014. Its original release described a weekly service delivering ready-to-eat vegetables and fruit to companies, giving employees a simple way to add fresh produce to snacks or meals. By late May 2014, the company said it had reached roughly 100 customer companies.^[7]

Then the model broke. KOMPEITO’s own history says vegetables spoiled in a customer’s refrigerator in July 2014, forcing the company to suspend the service. It needed different refrigerators and a more reliable quality-control process at outsourced food-production facilities. With new financing, including investment from Kewpie, the service resumed that October.^[6]

A food subscription cannot scale like software. Every new account creates physical obligations: food must be made, chilled or frozen, transported, stocked and monitored. Waste has to be controlled. Product safety has to survive growth. That operational burden is one of the most important things to understand about KOMPEITO as a listed company.

From “vegetables” to full meals

Today the company’s two main plans are the refrigerated “Office de Yasai” line and the frozen “Office de Gohan” line. In the FY2026 forecast released on listing day, KOMPEITO projected ¥5.116 billion of revenue from the refrigerated service and ¥3.386 billion from the frozen service. Together, they account for roughly 86% of the group revenue forecast. The company says its assortment has expanded to around 160 products and that it increasingly encourages customers to use both refrigerated and frozen plans.^[3]

The frozen business is especially revealing. KOMPEITO says customers value the lower inventory-management burden of frozen food, while higher-priced items such as frozen boxed meals have helped raise average revenue per customer. The original proposition — make vegetables easier to eat at work — has gradually expanded into something closer to a distributed workplace meal system.

A 72% revenue-growth forecast — and a return to profit

The listing-day earnings document projects FY2026 consolidated revenue of ¥9.871 billion, up about 72% from ¥5.737 billion in FY2025. Operating profit is forecast at ¥880 million, reversing the prior year’s ¥225 million operating loss. Ordinary profit is forecast at ¥877 million, and net income attributable to owners of the parent at ¥1.126 billion.^[3]

There is an important accounting distinction. FY2026 ended on August 31, but the September 11 document still presents these figures as company forecasts, not final audited full-year results. Actual results through the first nine months were ¥7.047 billion in revenue and ¥671 million in operating profit. The company also notes that its unusually strong net-income forecast benefits from tax effects related to accumulated tax losses and its capital structure, so the operating-profit line is a cleaner view of the underlying turn in earnings.^[3]

The sales engine increasingly runs through regional banks

One of the more unusual parts of KOMPEITO’s growth model is its reliance on banks and credit unions as customer-acquisition partners. The company divides new sales into partner sales, or PS, in which financial institutions introduce the service to corporate customers, and online sales driven by web advertising and related channels.

For FY2026, KOMPEITO expects 2,907 new contracted companies, with roughly 64% coming through partner sales. The number of partner financial institutions rose from 73 at the end of the previous fiscal year to 81 by the end of the third quarter. For a regional bank, OFFICE DE YASAI becomes one more service to offer business clients. For KOMPEITO, the relationship can provide access to local companies without building a full direct-sales network in every region.^[3]

The company forecasts 7,052 contracted companies at fiscal year-end. Its September 11 listing announcement, however, says the service has been introduced at more than 6,600 companies nationwide. Those figures may reflect different dates or definitions and should not be treated as identical measures. For the public listing date, Japan.co.jp uses the company’s stated adoption figure of more than 6,600 companies.

A tax change gives workplace meals a larger tailwind

Japan’s tax treatment of employer-provided meals changed in April 2026. Under National Tax Agency guidance, when employees pay at least half the value of a meal and other conditions are satisfied, the amount an employer can contribute without the benefit being treated as taxable salary increased from ¥3,500 to ¥7,500 a month, excluding consumption tax.^[9]

KOMPEITO explicitly identifies that higher threshold as a potential demand driver for employee meal-support services. The tax change does not guarantee that companies will spend more on food benefits, but it expands the room available for employers that want to do so and gives the entire workplace-meal category a more favorable policy backdrop.^[3]

The IPO was mostly a sale by existing shareholders

The structure of the listing deserves attention. TSE documents show only 50,000 newly issued shares in the public offering. By contrast, 4,139,300 shares were offered by existing shareholders through the underwritten secondary sale, with another 628,200 shares available through over-allotment. In other words, the overwhelming majority of stock sold in the IPO came from existing holders rather than new shares issued by the company.^[2]

The offer price was ¥1,600. Tokyo IPO, a private market-data service, records the first trade at ¥1,480, 7.5% below the offer price. Yahoo! Finance Japan shows the stock later reaching ¥1,700 and closing its first day at ¥1,670. Those trading figures are secondary market data rather than figures in the TSE listing-approval documents, so they are attributed accordingly.^{[10] [11]}

The less glamorous constraint: food still has to move

Unlike pure software, workplace food does not become nearly free to distribute when the customer count grows. KOMPEITO’s listing materials devote considerable attention to procurement costs, warehouse work and delivery economics. The company says ingredient purchase prices rose about 3% between the end of FY2024 and FY2025. Its response includes diversifying outsourced production, raising the share of private-label products above 60%, installing automated picking equipment and negotiating transport costs.^[3]

At major warehouses, the company says material-handling automation has reduced the cost per pick by roughly 20% to 30%. That kind of detail may matter more to long-term shareholders than the number of refrigerators installed. Growth is valuable only if each new office can be served without delivery and replenishment costs consuming the additional revenue.

Beyond the office

KOMPEITO is also becoming broader than OFFICE DE YASAI. It created KOMPEITO USA Inc. in 2024. The same year it established ODY Deliveries, which handles dairy delivery. In October 2025, it acquired Yushoku, a company serving meals to elderly people at home and prepared food to care facilities.^{[5] [12]}

For FY2026, the group forecasts ¥640 million of revenue from ODY Deliveries and ¥428 million from Yushoku. The expansion suggests that KOMPEITO increasingly sees its core capability not simply as selling salads at work but as organizing food, recurring routes and last-mile delivery for defined groups of customers.^[3]

What the public market will measure next

In 2014, OFFICE DE YASAI was a small experiment in getting vegetables into offices. Twelve years later, KOMPEITO is entering the public market while targeting nearly ¥10 billion of annual revenue and a return to operating profitability.

From here, investors will be able to judge the model in more demanding terms: churn, annual recurring revenue, revenue per customer, gross margin, delivery costs, acquisition efficiency through partner banks, food-safety execution and the integration of newly acquired businesses. KOMPEITO expects an average monthly churn rate of 1.2% and annual recurring revenue of ¥9.641 billion at FY2026 year-end.^[3]

The company’s story is compelling precisely because it was built from ordinary problems. Unsold vegetables. A store that did not sell enough. Refrigerators that were not good enough. The difficulty of delivering food every week. KOMPEITO turned those frictions into a business model. Its listing on the TSE Growth Market begins the next test: whether that model can keep scaling without losing the operational discipline that made the office refrigerator work in the first place.