Incorporated in 1972, Rock Field Co., Ltd. is a manufacturer and seller of prepared food in Kobe.
It currently sells Japanese, western and oriental food under such brand names as "RF1" all over Japan. Kozo Iwata, the founder and builder of Rock Field, was born in Kobe in 1940. The youngest of three brothers, he lost his mother at the age of five. While studying at a night high school after his graduation from junior high school, Iwata became a live-in employee of a Japanese restaurant and was trained there. In 1965, he left the restaurant and opened a western restaurant, "Hook", in Nankin-Machi in Kobe.
In 1970, he made a tour around Europe and the U.S. to learn about restaurants there. What interested him during the tour was the haute cuisine of Fauchon in Paris, Alois Dallmayr in Munich and Peck Milano in Milan. After returning to Japan, he established Rock Field in 1972 and changed his career from the restaurant trade to the home-meal replacement business. In the same year, he opened his first western-style delicatessen shop on the basement floor of Daimaru in Kobe. In 1980, new shops were opened in Yokohama and in Tokyo, which put his company on track for stable growth in sales and management. Having successfully survived the water pollution crisis at the Kobe Factory in 1988, the company introduced Kobe Croquette in 1989, a blockbuster product which gained widespread public attention. In 1992, a uniform brand name, "RF1", was introduced to try to transform the status of prepared food from special to ordinary food for households. In 1994, Iwata started to develop a new business, which included the opening of Chikyu Kenko Kazoku (literally "Global Healthy Family"), a high-street shop. By declaring his intention to "make Toyota a benchmark" of his company in 1999, he announced his plans to apply a cell production system, just-in-time system and other production systems used by Toyota.
In the modern era with a falling birth rate, and when "health, comfort, safety and environment" have become keywords, Iwata thrives on developing new products and business styles targeting children and the elderly, as illustrated by his choice of the slogans "shokuiku", or "dietary education" and "shokuraku" or "enjoying life through food." His management strategies include moving from shops in the basement floor of department stores to shops in "the buildings and shopping malls of railroad stations," and the opening of "be Organic", a shop based on the theme of organic food and ecology. Iwata always looks to the future and tries to provide "food entertainment" to respond to the ever changing and diversified lifestyles of Japanese people.
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