A starch-syrup maker’s off-season sideline.

Kabaya Foods was founded in Okayama in 1946; the company gives its date of establishment as 24 December 1946. Japanese Wikipedia says it began with sweets made behind a coffee shop in front of Okayama Station, and that its origin lay with Hayashibara, an Okayama maker of mizuame starch syrup (today Nagase Viita), which started producing caramel to fill the slack months of February and August, when demand for syrup fell; it cites a published history of the Hayashibara family. Kabaya stayed part of the Hayashibara group until 1979, when it became independent, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The name comes from the hippopotamus — kaba in Japanese. Japanese Wikipedia says the animal was chosen in the years just after the war for its image as peace-loving and gentle. The company describes its starting point in the same post-war terms: a time when everything was in short supply, and a wish to cheer Japan up with things made by a Japanese company and to bring children smiles and dreams.

The first big product was Kabaya Caramel. The company’s own timeline adds chocolate in 1951, baked sweets in 1953, powdered juice in 1960, chewing gum in 1963 and pressed tablet sweets in 1965, the year it gives for the launch of Juice C; Japanese Wikipedia dates the start of Juice C production to 1964. Pretzels followed in 1966 and boiled candy in 1967. Caramel, the founding line, ended in 1996, the company says, and in 2024 it ended candy production too.

A hippo on wheels and a library in a caramel box.

Kabaya’s early marketing was ambitious; Japanese Wikipedia calls it unusual for a sweet maker based in the regions. From 1952 to 1954 boxes of Kabaya Caramel carried coupons: collect fifty points, send them to the company, and a hardback from the Kabaya children’s library of world classics came back by post, Japanese Wikipedia says. The first volume, Cinderella, is dated August 1952, and the full set can be read at Okayama Prefectural Library, which has digitised it.

The same year Kabaya put its mascot on the road. The Kaba-sha, or “hippo car,” was an advertising vehicle with a hippo-shaped body and a box of Kabaya Caramel on its back. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the magazine Bus Japan, says the bodies were built by Hiroshima Body on Toyopet truck chassis, worked up from a full-size clay model and shaped by hand over six months; fifteen were made, and because each was handmade, each face came out slightly different. The first was unveiled in a school playground in Okayama in April 1952 before the fleet toured Japan; traffic rules eventually took the cars off the road, and none survives. For its 60th anniversary in 2006 the company revived the idea on a Toyota Estima, and a second car followed in 2011; the pair were named Cookie-kun and Choco-chan.

Toys became a second business. In 1978 Kabaya began making toy confectionery and, under a tie-up with the French maker Majorette, started selling Majorette model cars in Japan, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia credits Big One Gum, launched that year with a plastic model kit as its “bonus,” with laying the groundwork for Japan’s modern toy-confectionery market. The company dates Cebon Star, a girls’ accessory line, to 1979 and Honehone Zaurus to 2002. In 1988 Kabaya introduced the corporate identity it still uses, the company’s timeline says, and Japanese Wikipedia adds that the current logo dates from that year.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink and sweet names from Japan: Kirin, Suntory, Pocari Sweat, Mitsuya Cider, Fujiya, Kabaya and Yamazaki. Japanese drink and sweet brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a vending machine or convenience store to a supermarket shelf.

A drink or sweet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink, snack or treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Gummies, tablets and a new owner.

Kabaya’s range today centres on gummies, tablet sweets, chocolate and toy confectionery, the company says. Gummy production began in 1990; Sakusaku Panda, a chocolate snack, was launched in 1996; Pureral Gummy followed in 2004, Enbun Charge Tablets in 2009 and Tough Gummy in 2014. Kabaya began exporting sweets in 2017, starting with three gummies for North America, the Sanyo Shimbun reported.

The company says it makes its sweets at two plants. The Okayama factory, moved to its present site in the city’s Kita ward in 1991, makes gummies, tablet sweets, chocolate and toy confectionery; the Kanto factory at Hitachi-Omiya in Ibaraki Prefecture, built in 1984 with a second plant added in 2011, makes chocolate, tablet sweets and toy confectionery. The company says the Kanto factory gained FSSC 22000 food-safety certification in 2018 and Okayama in 2019. An Osaka factory closed in 2014, Japanese Wikipedia says, and the Kanto factory offers booked tours of its Sakusaku Panda line.

Ownership has changed twice in a decade. In 2016 a holding company, Nippon Kabaya Ohayo Holdings, was set up above Kabaya and the dairy maker Ohayo Dairy, Japanese Wikipedia says. On 28 May 2024 Kabaya announced that it would accept a capital investment from a special-purpose company funded by a fund run by the Tokyo private-equity firm D Capital. The confectionery business was moved into a new company, the share transfer completed in late July 2024 and Kabaya left the Kabaya-Ohayo group, Japanese Wikipedia says. In April 2025 the Tokyo head office moved to Toranomon; the company now lists head offices in both Okayama and Tokyo.

For a design guide, Kabaya shows how a hippo, a caramel box and a toy in the packet can carry a regional sweet maker through eight decades. Compare Glico, the Osaka caramel maker, and Morinaga, the Tokyo confectioner. For this guide we use a hippo blue, a caramel tan and a candy orange with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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