At 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon in Nagasaki every seat in the Sukiya beef-bowl outlet is occupied. As Japanese pop music plays in the background, employees in maroon polo shirts and khakis move swiftly through the restaurant, delivering and clearing trays of food.  Munenori Muraoka, a heating and air conditioner repairman and a regular Sukiya customer, sits down, orders and is served within two minutes. His meal costs less than $5. "I don't love the food here, but it's quick and easy," he says between bites. Five minutes later Muraoka is out the door and a little girl has taken his seat.  Sukiya's parent company, Zensho, takes those two concepts--quick and easy--very seriously. A 49-page company charter advises employees to take at least two steps every second and limits business negotiations to half an hour. An in-house research group devises ways to eliminate inefficiencies in the workplace, analyzing even the subtlest movement of an employee's wrist. Zensho even holds an annual "S1 Grand Prix" contest for Sukiya staff, in which staffers must serve six customers in as many minutes. (S1 stands for "smile, speed, service.")  This low-price, high-turnover, highly controlled approach is working. Zensho sells nearly one in two gyudon, or beef bowls, consumed in Japanese fast-food chains. This year, in a victory for rice over bread, the group's sales are expected to surpass those of McDonald's Japan. In the six months to Sept. 30, 2010 Zensho's sales rose 13.7% to $2.23 billion (¥184.5 billion).  To Chief Executive Kentaro Ogawa, a onetime shipyard worker and aspiring labor organizer, these results are a blend of art and science--the arts of uniform and menu design, for example, and the sciences of ergonomics, logistics and merchandising.  They are also a reflection of 62-year-old Ogawa's singular philosophy of business. In addition to the myriad requirements detailed in the largely secret company charter, Zensho refuses to benchmark itself against competitors. Comparisons lead companies to create products and services that resemble those of their competitors, Ogawa argues. Ultimately benchmarking makes companies indistinguishable from the competition, "and everyone goes down together," he told FORBES ASIA in a rare interview with the foreign press.  "Japanese people have a tendency to compare themselves with others. . . . But to me, only by being the one and only Zensho, the one and only Kentaro Ogawa, do you have value. Uniqueness matters."  Zensho is certainly unique. In addition to Sukiya, a 24-hour chain, and Nakau, another beef-bowl restaurant, which together account for about 80% of its pretax profits of $76 million in the six months to the end of September, it operates 18 other restaurants, two pizza delivery chains and a fruit-and-vegetable retail group. Zensho has 5 food processing companies and 27 factories. It also has 25 distribution centers, an in-house inspection center and its own farms.  In an age of outsourcing Ogawa insists on vertical integration. "We can't guarantee the safety of the food we sell if we let Company A handle this and Company B handle that," he says. Zensho claims that about 80% of the ingredients that it uses are fully traceable, either to its own plants or trusted partners.
Japan's Zensho is rapid fire in its corporate ways and in how its beef-bowl restaurants serve up fare.