Six of Japan’s biggest ice cream makers face accusations of collaborating to keep fairly priced ice cream out of consumers’ hands/stomachs.
Authorities in Japan have launched an investigation into a suspected cartel. The suspected members are not members of the shadowy criminal underground, but six very well-known companies. While the group isn’t accused of selling drugs, smuggling weapons, or any other such dealings in contraband, if they were indeed doing what investigators think there were, they committed a truly heinous crime: ice cream price-fixing.
On June 16, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission launched on-site investigations at the facilities of six major Japanese confectionery companies: Meiji, Lotte, Morinaga Seika, Morinaga Nyugyo, Ezaki Glico, and Akagi Nyugyo. All six are among Japan’s largest manufacturers and distributors of ice cream, and are supposed to be competitors (Morinaga Seika owns about 10 percent of Morinaga Nyugyo’s stock, but they’re otherwise separate companies). The Fair Trade Commission believes, though, that executives from the six companies have been exchanging information, both through in-person meetings, and email, to keep each other informed of upcoming price increases for their products, thus allowing them to collectively manipulate market prices for ice cream in Japan. The commission suspects that the companies have been engaging in this activity for several years.
It’s worth noting that in Japan retailers tend to take manufacturers’ suggested retail prices pretty seriously. While you’ll find occasional sales and special discounts, oftentimes retailers sell snack foods at whatever price the manufacturer dictates. With all six of the companies under investigation also acting as wholesalers who supply major supermarket and convenience store chains, they’re in even more of a position to exert pressure on shops to sell their products at MSRP, and if the companies have been collaborating to raise their prices in unison, it would keep any one of them from losing sales by making the higher prices look like an unavoidable market evolution.
It’s one thing if prices rise across the board simply as a result of competitors reacting to one another. For example, there’s nothing illegal going on in a scenario where Lotte raises its ice cream prices by 30 yen and suffers no loss in sales volume, so then Meiji, seeing that customers will accept higher prices, also decides to raise its prices to grab more revenue. On the other hand, if competing companies are exchanging information in order to create premeditated plans to coordinate price increases, that would be a violation of Japan’s antimonopoly act.
Because of that, the investigation will likely be focused on looking for proof of such premeditation. Adding a gray-area element to the situation, though, is that Japanese companies often publicly announce changes to their suggested retail prices before they go into effect. Ostensibly this is to let consumers brace for the higher prices they’ll need to pay, but it also creates a window of plausible deniability regarding price-fixing by giving other companies enough time to adjust their prices upward and have the changeover happen at or near the same time as their competitors’ moves.
The investigation comes amidst a climate of companies in Japan rapidly raising prices, usually citing increased raw material costs due to shipping disruptions caused by international conflicts and the depressed value of the yen. However, it’s not like the ice cream industry in Japan is hurting for revenue. According to the Japan Ice Cream Association (of which all six companies under investigation are members), 2025 was the sixth year in a row for the value of ice cream shipments in Japan to reach a record high. The total for 2025 came to 663.1 billion yen (US$4.2 billion), an increase of more than 40 percent compared to 10 years earlier, despite Japan’s population shrinking over that period.
Source: Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun
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