Meiji (明治)

Meiji was born in 1916 from the merger of two confectioners and quickly became the pioneer of Japanese-made chocolate, in a country that had only been importing it for a few decades. Its red-wrapped bar, the mushroom-shaped Kinoko no Yama and the triangular Apollo are childhood memory objects for several generations.

The group is also the country's leading dairy and one of its major pharmaceutical laboratories — a combination that puzzles Westerners but follows the original logic: feed an undernourished country, then treat it. It was also Meiji that popularised Valentine's chocolate, with the campaign that made women the givers.