Yonezawa Gyu Oki

Yonezawa Gyu Oki traces to 1923, when founder Yoshimasa Oki opened a small butcher shop (seinikuten) in Yonezawa and, alongside it, a hibachi-grilled beef hot-pot restaurant — the same pairing of retail butchery and prepared food that still defines the business a century later. The company incorporated in 1971 and is headquartered in Yonezawa, Yamagata prefecture, with a processing facility on site and restaurants in Yonezawa, Ginza, and at Tokyo Station.

The company describes itself today as a fully vertically integrated "sixth-industry" operation, spanning cattle raising, processing, wholesale and retail meat sales, and restaurant service — a structure it presents as central to how it controls Yonezawa beef quality end to end. Its online shop states specific, checkable standards: cattle are exclusively nulliparous females, aged a minimum of 33 months, sold under proprietary house grades (Yushu-gyu and Kiwaki-gyu), and the shop cites Japan Meat Grading Association standards of Grade 3 or higher.

Yonezawa beef itself carries Geographical Indication (GI) protection from the Japanese government since 2017, and the company states ISO 22000 food-safety certification for its processing operation — both real, checkable regulatory and standards claims rather than marketing language alone. The cattle and aging standards above are company-stated specifications.