[Shopify Merchant Interview Series]
Succeeding a family business—by nature, that's a choice to protect and build on an existing business. Starting a company, on the other hand, is a choice to design a business from zero, face the market, take on risk, and aim for growth.
Ryo Kikuchi, President and CEO of Pekofull Inc., is taking on both of these seemingly contradictory management decisions at once.
While involved in managing his family's seafood processing plant, Kikuchi single-handedly launched Pekofull Inc., a company developing domestically made pet food.
Rather than treating it as an extension of the family business, he deliberately chose to build the new venture as a separate company. Behind that choice was a clear-eyed judgment about business structure, market characteristics, and growth strategy.
Not "succeeding in order to protect," but "launching in order to create the next growth."
In this article, we asked about the decision-making process behind pursuing business succession and a new venture in parallel, and about the e-commerce strategy built around Shopify.
(Ryo Kikuchi, President and CEO, Pekofull Inc.)
From a Financial Institution, to the Family Business, to Starting a Company
Rising raw material costs, and the impact of climate change on primary industries.
The environment surrounding small and medium-sized regional businesses—particularly in food and fisheries—has changed dramatically over the past decade. Not a few companies are being forced to rethink their very structure, since simply continuing the business as-is is no longer viable.
Amid these environmental changes, a turning point for Kikuchi came when his experience working with SME management at a financial institution overlapped with the realities facing his own family's business.
—— You founded a pet food business in 2023, but you're also what's called an "atotsugi"—someone succeeding a family business. Could you tell us about your path, from joining the family business to founding your own company?
Ryo Kikuchi (hereafter, Kikuchi) Kakiya Co., Ltd. was founded by my grandfather, my father is the second-generation president, and I'm his eldest son, so I always figured I'd take it over myself someday. I moved to Tokyo, majored in business management, and, thinking it would be the job that let me meet the most SME owners, I joined a bank that specializes in small and medium-sized businesses.
I wanted to know what being a business owner was really like. I joined Shoko Chukin Bank straight out of university and spent six years handling corporate lending to small and medium-sized businesses.
That said, my father and grandfather had always told me, "you don't have to take over." They felt that once I'd joined a bank, I should just spend my whole career on that stable path.
—— Given that, what ultimately led you to decide to return to the family business?
Kikuchi Rising raw material costs, and the fact that global warming was making it harder to catch fish in the first place, meant that the family business was facing a fairly harsh environment too. So I left the bank in March 2023 and joined Kakiya Co., Ltd. At the same time, I founded Pekofull Inc. in June of that same year. I had actually been preparing the concept for the new business before I went back to the family business.
I felt it would be quite difficult to keep going with just the seafood business, and that I needed to think about a new venture too. As I researched market data and drew on the connections I'd built during my banking career, the pet food and pet industry emerged as a growth sector for the future.
(Kakiya Co., Ltd. corporate site)
The Management Decision to Split Off a New Company, Triggered by an M&A
Kikuchi Right around the time I returned to the family business, there was actually a major turning point for the company. My grandfather, the founder and majority shareholder, had decided to sell the company through an M&A deal.
By the time I came back, we were already at the point of deciding whether to sell or not. But there wasn't anyone in-house who could organize the numbers, so I ended up joining and pulling together the M&A contract work as well.
—— With a sale on the table, that must have changed how you approached the business succession.
Kikuchi If we were going to sell the company, there was no reason to bundle a new venture into it. In fact, if there was a chance this could become my real family business going forward, I felt it should be split off clearly.
So I carved out just the pet food business and launched it as a separate company: Pekofull Inc. It was a rushed start, just two months after leaving my previous job, but that's how it began.
—— And meanwhile, you're also continuing to take over the management of Kakiya Co., Ltd. itself.
Kikuchi That's right. The ownership changed, but management itself is still being carried out by the Kikuchi family. Kakiya Co., Ltd. is the main business, and going forward I'll be taking on the role of its president as well.
—— Going from seafood to pet food, both are "food"—were there commonalities between them?
Kikuchi Food and pet food seem similar, but they're actually completely different.
Under regulations, pet food isn't classified as "food" at all—it's treated as "general merchandise." Put simply, you can't manufacture pet food in a food factory. There are also various downsides for brand image.
As long as we were handling human food, we needed to clearly separate it from anything made for pets.
(Pekofull's flagship product: domestically made roll food)
How the Strengths of the Existing Business Were Connected to the New Venture
The decision to split the company into two doesn't mean severing ties with the existing business or cutting off its resources. Rather, it was a decision grounded in business rationality: separate out areas that differ in business risk, regulation, and growth speed, while sharing whatever strengths can be leveraged to the fullest.
While the two are clearly separate as legal entities, assets the family business built up over many years—manufacturing, quality control, supply chain—have been reshaped by Kikuchi and carried into the new venture.
—— Are there aspects of Kakiya Co., Ltd.'s manufacturing and business know-how that carry over into Pekofull?
Kikuchi There are. Pekofull is basically OEM, but the products are made by partner factories that we already had ties with through Kakiya.
One is that we're able to leverage Kakiya's 50 years of networks—suppliers, partner factories, and sales channels.
The other is in product development. We make full use of the know-how we built up as a food factory, bringing the same level of quality and hygiene control as Kakiya directly into our pet food.
We draw on knowledge from human food—formulations, how to bring out umami—to make products at a level that doesn't yet have precedent in the pet food industry. We talk with veterinarians about things like the moisture content dogs respond to best, or the right ratio of animal to plant protein.
Because we start from a foundation as food professionals, our development speed is fast, and as a result, we feel we're able to make products dogs really respond to.
Translating Market Change Into a Profit Structure: Why They Decided to Enter
—— How did you see the path to winning in the pet food market at the time you decided to enter it?
Kikuchi Since pet food is originally classified as "general merchandise" rather than food, it was also a space that food-industry players hadn't seriously entered, and honestly, I think there was a lot of gray area around how ingredients were handled and what quality standards applied.
What changed things dramatically was the pandemic. Going out and eating out were restricted, both in Japan and abroad, and the center of gravity of life shifted back into the home. That's when the trend of treating pets as "family" strengthened all at once.
—— Given that shift, how did you come to see your own path to winning?
Kikuchi The key point was that there was a lot of room to bring food-industry know-how straight into this market.
In Japan, Inaba, the maker of CIAO Churu, was among the first to catch this structural shift in the pet food market. Inaba was also originally a seafood processor, and with the impact of the pandemic and global warming, seafood businesses moved into the cat food market all at once. Since they were already handling fish, the affinity was high.
Around the same time, highly processed pet food closer to frozen meals or ready-made side dishes was starting to appear overseas. Seeing that, I thought, "if that's the case, then bringing in food industry know-how could let us make something higher quality, at a lower cost."
In short, we started development once we saw that we could put out a product with a high profit margin.
Turning Coincidence Into Results: The Move to Exhibit at a Trade Show
One major turning point in Pekofull's early growth was exhibiting at a trade show. Another was an unexpected import halt affecting a competing brand.
Kikuchi himself looks back on this as "just luck," but behind turning that coincidence into results was a core set of judgment calls and preparation.
—— Pekofull hit "10,000 units sold" in its second year on the market, which feels like a remarkably fast start for an e-commerce site. Was there anything you were pursuing strategically?
Kikuchi Of course there was strategy involved, but honestly, it was mostly "luck."
Up until April 2025, our sales were at a scale of around 100,000 yen a month. Around that time, we exhibited for the first time at "Interpets," a trade show held at Tokyo Big Sight. We spent about 400,000 yen on it.
Right around that time, a well-known New Zealand brand—one that had actually influenced the development of our main product, the roll food—stopped being able to enter Japan due to the effects of avian flu, and abruptly canceled its participation in that same trade show.
People who were searching for "isn't there a domestic alternative?" flowed straight to Pekofull all at once. Starting the day after the event, our sales jumped all at once to 1 million yen a month.
—— You had no way of knowing about the competitor's import halt beforehand, right?
Kikuchi I had no idea at all. If anything, I was actually planning to go over to that brand's booth and pitch them, saying, "if you want something domestic, we've got you."
—— Even if it was luck, whether you can seize it or not still comes down to the momentum a brand has built, doesn't it.
(Exhibiting at Interpets, one of Japan's largest pet events)
—— When you say trade show, does that mean your wholesale sales expanded?
Kikuchi No, we weren't doing wholesale at the time.
Interpets is a large-scale event that ordinary customers can attend with their dogs, and our booth was sold out day after day. The people who discovered us there went on to flow into Pekofull's own e-commerce site afterward.
Sales that were originally on the scale of 100,000 yen a month are now running as a business centered on our own e-commerce site, combined with wholesale as well.
—— To begin with, why did you decide to exhibit at a costly trade show while sales were still small?
Kikuchi The most important thing in pet food really is in-person sampling. If the dog won't eat it, people basically won't buy it.
Meeting customers directly at an event, having their dogs try the food, and growing our following—that felt like the approach that fit best. So I decided, "then let's exhibit at the biggest event in Japan this year."
We used our feet and our voices, and just kept pushing samples. As a result, it just so happened there was no competitor there. That's really all it was—it went viral because of that.
Building an E-Commerce Foundation for Continuing to Learn From Successful Merchants
At Pekofull, the company centers its own e-commerce site as the place to build brand value and customer relationships, while deliberately placing no restrictions on the wholesale channel it uses to grow sales volume.
Where to concentrate and where to expand, in order to achieve business growth even with a small team—that judgment has been consistently and strategically designed by Kikuchi.
It's precisely because of that premise that choosing an e-commerce platform wasn't simply picking a tool—it was itself a decision about how to grow the business.
—— Could you tell us about Pekofull's current e-commerce strategy and sales-channel policy?
Kikuchi The only channel we run ourselves is our own Shopify site. On the other hand, we place no restrictions on wholesale. Even for merchants who sell on Rakuten or Amazon, we supply all of that through wholesale.
—— So the idea is to keep your own e-commerce as a single, unified channel while expanding wholesale.
Kikuchi That's right. I think of it as a division of roles: our own e-commerce site is where we build the brand and our relationship with customers, and wholesale is where we go after volume.
—— You post frequently on social media too—are you doing all of that yourself?
Kikuchi That was true at first, but now I've started asking side-job workers to help with things around Shopify. One person handles Shopify overall, and another handles Instagram, TikTok, and our furusato nozei (hometown tax) operations. On top of that, I have someone under a contractor-style arrangement handling LINE and marketing across the pet industry more broadly. So it's roughly three outside partners plus me.
(Pekofull's e-commerce site, built on Shopify)
Thoroughly Tracing Successful Merchants: The Choice of Shopify
—— Among the many e-commerce platforms out there, why did you choose Shopify?
Kikuchi I'd often heard that switching e-commerce platforms is a huge hassle, so once I decided, I didn't want to change. So the first thing I did was ask literally everyone I could—seniors and merchants running e-commerce businesses.
I looked into a lot of options, including BASE, but in the end, Shopify was the platform used by the highest proportion of merchants succeeding in the 100 million to 500 million yen annual revenue range.
On top of that, there's a senior from my college club activities whom I respect most, who runs a fitness brand, and he was using Shopify too. That was really the deciding factor.
I wanted to put myself in the same environment as successful entrepreneurs, in a position where I could keep hearing the same know-how they had.
—— Listening to you, I get the sense that your decision-making consistently comes from an "entrepreneur's perspective." We often hear reasons like Shopify being easy to use or that you can start without code, but choosing a platform from the standpoint of "creating an environment where I can keep learning from people growing a business at the same phase" is really striking.
Rebuilding a family business, and launching a new venture. Facing two seemingly contradictory themes at once, what Kikuchi has consistently valued isn't "how to protect," but "how to grow."
Translating market change into a profit structure, and mapping out a viable path to winning as a business. And, while keeping his own e-commerce site at the center, building an environment where he can keep learning from merchants growing their businesses at the same phase. His choice of an e-commerce foundation, starting with Shopify, is an extension of that same business design.
So what shape does Kikuchi envision for the brand from here? How will he build his relationship with customers, and how will they grow together?
In Part 2 of this interview, we ask about the goals behind his crowdfunding campaign, the perspective of "a brand whose MVV (mission, vision, values) reaches all the way to its customers," and what's ahead for Pekofull.
