CoCo Ichibanya Brand Guidelines: The 1978 Aichi Curry House in the House Foods Group

A coffee shop’s curry becomes a chain.

CoCo Ichibanya began as a side dish in a coffee shop. Japanese Wikipedia says that Munetoshi Muneji and his wife Naomi opened a coffee shop called Bacchus in 1974 at Nishibiwajima, a town in Nishikasugai district on the edge of Nagoya, and that the curry rice it served did so well that they opened a curry restaurant. The company’s own history dates the first Curry House CoCo Ichibanya to January 1978, in the same town, which is now part of the city of Kiyosu in Aichi Prefecture. Japanese Wikipedia says the name comes from the phrase “Koko ga ichiban ya!”, roughly “this place is the one,” and that the chain is widely called CoCoICHI, or Kokoichi.

The company grew in steps that its own timeline sets out. A chain headquarters and a factory followed at Bisai, also in Aichi, in November 1979; the first franchised restaurant opened at Inazawa in April 1980; and in July 1982 the franchise business was incorporated as Ichibanya Co., Ltd., with separate companies for directly run restaurants and food production. In 1983 it moved to a new head office and factory in Ichinomiya, which remains its head office. The chain reached 100 restaurants in December 1988, opened in all 47 prefectures in May 1994 and reached 1,000 restaurants in December 2004, according to the company.

Its franchise model is distinctive. In January 1981 the company set up what it calls the Bloom System, under which employees can leave to run their own CoCo Ichibanya, and in June 1995 it stopped taking franchisees from outside. Japanese Wikipedia says about six in ten Japanese restaurants are run by owners who came up through the system, and that its staff name badges, in colours from white to gold, show each employee’s grade in a company skills test. The founders stepped back from management in the 2000s, the same source says.

Rice, spice and toppings, chosen by the diner.

The product is a system rather than a single dish. Diners choose a base curry sauce, then the amount of rice, the spice level and any toppings, a format that Japanese Wikipedia describes and that Inside Retail summed up in August 2026 as letting customers build their own plate by spice level, portion size and topping. Concrete Playground added that toppings can come in half sizes. Japanese Wikipedia says the spice scale runs above the standard level in numbered steps, and that the chain’s “normal” matches the medium heat of supermarket curry roux.

That roux has a House Foods history. Japanese Wikipedia says that when the Munejis tested curry roux from several makers, Naomi Muneji chose a House Foods product, and that the two companies have worked together on spice blends since the first restaurant opened. Ichibanya makes much of its sauce itself: its timeline lists factories for curry sauce at Saga, opened in 1997, and Tochigi, opened in 1999, alongside the head-office factory in Aichi, and in 2014 it started a retort-pouch line at Tochigi.

The look of the restaurants changed in January 2005, when, the company says, the CoCo Ichibanya logo was changed and its restaurant interiors and exteriors were redesigned. Japanese Wikipedia describes the difference: older restaurants, opened up to 2004, were yellowish outside and kept the old mark; newer and refitted ones use a dark brown exterior, a wood-toned interior and staff in blue shirts with black aprons. The founding restaurant at Kiyosu was rebuilt in January 2014 with the Ichibanya Memorial Hall, a company museum, on its upper floor, the company says.

The company has also opened other formats. Pasta de Coco, which began at Ichinomiya in March 2003, serves ankake spaghetti, a pasta with a thick starchy sauce associated with the Nagoya area; SPICE UP! COCOICHI BAKERY followed in December 2022, and the CoCoICHIBANYA WORLD restaurant at Kyobashi in Tokyo, opened in October 2022, brings menus from its overseas restaurants back to Japan. Since 2020 Ichibanya has also bought other restaurant businesses, from the Hakata motsunabe restaurant Maedaya to the tsukemen chain Menya Takei, its timeline shows.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s fast-food and conveyor-sushi chains present themselves first through the shop itself. A beef-bowl shop is often a single counter with stools, a curry or noodle shop a short line from order to tray, a sushi restaurant a lane of plates running past the tables. Many chains also run suburban roadside stores with car parks, table seating and drive-throughs, and units in station buildings and shopping-centre food courts, so the same name has to work on a tall roadside sign and on a narrow arcade front.

Ordering is part of the look. Many shops ask customers to buy a ticket from a machine before they sit down, and the machine’s screen, buttons and photographs become a menu in their own right; newer stores add self-checkout and mobile ordering. Conveyor-sushi chains add a piece of equipment of their own: the lane that carries plates past the seats.

Naming is usually plain. Signboards tend to state the dish as well as the name, and menus describe a bowl by what is on it, such as cheese, grated radish, kimchi or spring onion and egg, often in sizes from small to extra large. Some chains keep a word of their own for a familiar dish, and many publish their menus in English and Chinese for visitors.

Behind the shop front sits a listed company. Most of the large chains belong to parent groups listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that run several formats under separate names, and their corporate sites publish company histories, store counts and overseas subsidiaries year by year. Those pages, read alongside Japanese and English press, are the clearest record of when a chain opened its first store, when it went abroad and who owns it now.

A House Foods subsidiary since 2015.

The chain went abroad in June 1994, when a Hawaii subsidiary opened a restaurant on Oahu; the company sold that subsidiary in 2002, and it carried on as a franchisee. Mainland China followed with a Shanghai restaurant in September 2004, then Taiwan in 2005, South Korea and Thailand in 2008, Hong Kong in 2010, California and Singapore in 2011, Indonesia in 2013, the Philippines in 2015, Vietnam and London’s Leicester Square in 2018, India in 2020 and Guam in 2025, according to the company’s timeline. In August 2026 Inside Retail and Concrete Playground reported plans for Australia’s first CoCo Ichibanya, at the Journal Market Way development on Franklin Street in central Melbourne.

Ownership followed the long supplier relationship. Ichibanya’s shares were first traded over the counter in 2000, then listed in Tokyo and Nagoya in 2004 and moved to the first sections in May 2005. In December 2015, after a tender offer by House Foods Group, Ichibanya became a House Foods subsidiary, the company’s timeline records; Japanese Wikipedia dates the tender offer to the same month. Ichibanya remained listed, and in April 2022 moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market.

That structure is now under review. Inside Retail Asia reported on 1 September 2026 that, after a Nikkei Asia report that House Foods was weighing a sale, House Foods said it was considering all available options, including taking Ichibanya private, and that no specific decisions had been made. The same report said the chain had more than 1,400 outlets worldwide.

For a design guide, CoCo Ichibanya shows how a chain can turn a choice of rice, spice and toppings into its identity, and how a store refit can mark a new era. Compare Mos Burger, another Japanese chain that redesigned its restaurants in the 2000s, and Sukiya, a Japanese rice-bowl chain. For this guide we use a roux brown and a curry gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CoCo Ichibanya’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.