Miki Kanamaru

Graduated from Keio University Faculty of Environmental Information in 1998, and started working for Morinaga & Co.

Early years at Morinaga, Miki was a Product Planner in Product Development, for products such as choco flake, Angel Pie, Hannama Cake, Akachan Biquit, and became product manager/marketer for these products. She learns that researchers, factory workers, sales people are not necessary have the same vision/directions and understand the importance and difficulty of understanding different motivations to lead the team towards the same goal.

When she was moved to the advertisement department to be in charge of Commercial production, Homepage production, TV/magazine medias in 2002.  Miki was able to broaden her learning and was exciting to work more with external people to communicate more interesting fun things to the world, and experience moments when ideas broaden.

After getting married and giving birth, right when she was starting to grow roots into this exciting and fun work with good human relations, she was suddenly appointed to new business development department in 2010.  Initially, the theme was inbound sales, with her being the only member of the team. She sat in the Management Strategy Division, with other staff busy at their own business, and as the person in charge of Inbound, there was no real instruction nor expectation. She gradually realized that she had the freedom to “climb the mountain, and the scenery will change”, and found the joy of planning and progressing independently, and in April 2011, opened the antenna shop “Okashina Okashiya-san (The funny sweets shop)” in Tokyo Station and Diver City in Odaiba. 

Consequently, she was transferred to New business creation Division in 2014, and started the first accelerator program in the food industry. She met many entrepreneurs and businesspeople and was shocked what a small world she has been living in. After being immersed in this world and broadening her perspective, she herself started to aspire to do her own business, and established SEE THE SUN as a corporate venture of Morinaga in April 2014. With the corporate mission “For the happiness of all people who create a table for food” the company aspires to be a platform company to design a place to resolve social issues in food that are “on our table” and “in back of our table (from the producers to the restaurants, businesses that provide food)”, be it individual or corporate.