Why Choose Us
Direct action to help people attain
health and beauty.
For half a century, Ortho has looked straight at consumers’ beauty aspirations
and health concerns. We always strive to take on new challenges and to go that extra step,
and we excel in making products that can create new markets.
Learn more about what we can do for our clients looking to create new products.
Creating delightful, delicious, and innovative sensations
with product development to carve out new markets.
We come up with entirely novel ideas to realize products with unique value.
While Ortho is not the only company that can create new products, some products can only come to life through our expertise.
You can count on us to develop successful, novel, and unique products that will create new markets.
We deliver excitement never seen before in Japan through Ortho’s unique ideas. We will support you every step of the way, from drafting product plans through to sales promotions.
We will work with you to explore unmet consumer needs and propose plans for exciting products that can gain market dominance with differentiating qualities. MERAKIA ideation* is in Ortho’s DNA. We strive to create excitement as we combine market research and needs exploration with ingredient data and the seeds of new research topics to create refined plans.
* This refers to an out-of-the-box approach to create solutions and ideas by viewing seemingly stifling restrictions as positive factors instead. The word “MERAKIA” is derived from the Japanese term for “giving up” (akirame), but with the order of syllables reversed.
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Knowledge for Creating
and Selling Products
Business does not end with manufacturing. We provide comprehensive support for post-launch sales promotions.
In addition to in-store signage, leaflets, campaigns, and other sales promotion planning, we can help you develop product names and advertising copy tailored to your target audience based on market research. We also assist with monitor testing and other activities to establish a brand and expand product sales.
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Our Unique Perspective Defies Convention
We leverage our greatest advantage of being a fabless company by partnering with a wide range of supplement plants, food processing factories, and ingredient manufacturers. This lets us create plans that suit your needs with a freeform approach to ingredient selection, product format, and packaging options.
We have a strong track record in tackling tough challenges to reach taste-conscious consumers.
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Creating Complex Flavors
Anyone can develop products efficiently using a set number of ingredients. However, it is not so easy to cater to the needs of taste-conscious clients, or to help companies with their first foray in development.
These cases are where Ortho’s capabilities truly shine. We explore ingredients and proprietary processing methods, and we can work with the optimal plant owing to our fabless structure. This enables us to tackle extremely difficult projects with a strong success rate.
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Ortho Believes That Healthy Products Should Taste Good
Many functional supplement ingredients are bitter, have an unpleasant taste or smell, or degrade easily due to heat or moisture.
However, we have cultivated the knowledge to blend these ingredients into conventional formats (such as drinks, baked confectioneries, jellies, and retort pouches) that taste delicious. Some may say that good medicine should taste bitter, but we are dedicated to creating flavors that will have customers coming back for more.
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Swift Prototyping in a Tokyo Laboratory
We have a laboratory room for development in our Tokyo office.
With an extensive stock of ingredients, it has everything we need for rapid prototyping work. In some projects, we have created over 100 prototypes to develop new flavors.
We always strive for customer satisfaction as we work to achieve the right taste.
We conduct joint research with academia through functional ingredient development, clinical trials, and patents. Research creates value added for successful sales.
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Exploring Ingredients That Create New Markets
We search through raw materials, identify functions, consider market needs, and create ingredients as a one-stop service. Our goal is to develop functional ingredients with a close eye on market trends.
What’s more, we file patents for inventions using new functions with these ingredients. We draft research plans that link product planning to sales through discoveries that have the potential to carve out new markets.
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Experts in Function Research
One area that we particularly focus on is utilizing intellectual property to make unique products. We conduct tests and file patents with a view toward planning and organizing clinical trials and then securing rights.
If you have just begun your journey in R&D, you can count on us to help you secure patent rights to create products with value added. We can also support the incorporation of functional research in planning, which is a key step in boosting value added.
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Academic-Industry Partnerships to Boost Sales
With the aim of developing highly original Foods with Function Claims (FFC), we create proprietary systematic reviews and take on challenges in human clinical trials with unprecedented outcomes.
Through research and academic publishing in collaboration with multiple universities, we seek even greater value added to enhance sales.
Developing strong consumer and market insights through sales activities, and leveraging these insights to create new categories.
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Extensive Knowledge of Successful Marketing Copy
We don’t just plan products; we sell them too. Our direct experience in overcoming hurdles has enabled us to acquire a multifaceted understanding about sales.
One major challenge in the health food industry is the rapidly changing rules regarding what elements are permitted in advertisements. We expand our knowledge base through continual efforts to effectively express the unique and differentiating qualities of products while following these changing rules.
We put this knowledge to use in our own e-commerce platform as well as television shopping.
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Great Planning × Strong Products = Selling Power
Ortho feeds the knowledge it gains through sales activities into planning, marketing, product development, and R&D. Nobuyoshi Umezawa’s Key Needs Method inspires our efforts to build systems to propose new products.
Our planning capabilities boost the initial velocity of sales, while our product characteristics create repeat customers. We fuse market- and product-oriented perspectives from the start to develop concepts that will succeed on both fronts.
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Co-creation with Fans
In our product development projects, we utilize our knowledge of nutrition and medicine to get even closer to customers and to understand them better.
We seek to learn more about shifting lifestyles that are becoming increasingly complex, as well as the hopes and concerns of customers, to enhance our product development.
In 2023, we crossed paths with QON Inc. – a company with an extensive track record in building and running fan communities, as well as in consultation – and we created a community for health and beauty. This is helping us to use a scientific approach to investigate people’s everyday joys and concerns regarding health and beauty.
We intend to create completely new products by leveraging this community, and we invite you to join us on this journey.
Ortho Fan Community
Laboratory of Good Things
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The Secret Behind Long-selling Products
Hit products are founded on two elements; a concept that focuses on consumers’ latent needs, and performance that satisfies these needs.
For a hit product to enjoy long-term sales, it needs another key element in addition to concept and performance; namely, it must belong to an entirely new category. Products in a new category receive strong media attention and have no competition at launch, making it easier to nurture them to become long-selling products.
We focus on creating new markets because this approach is a key element behind creating long-selling products.
No quality check outsourcing. Carrying out quality assurance (QA) at our dedicated in-house department.
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Priority on QA in Product Launches
To achieve high-quality product manufacturing, a QA representative participates in the product development process.
We establish specifications, including expiry dates and items of analysis, so that our clients can conduct their business with peace of mind.
There are a wide range of regulations for health foods, but we develop products with solid compliance, going so far as to check the product text.
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Ensuring Quality Through Subcontractor Audits
We select the optimal plant for each project to achieve product development that matches our clients’ needs.
Each plant has a slightly different approach to management and quality. To elevate the level of quality in products, our QA department audits all subcontractor plants and instructs them on making improvements if any issues are identified.
We deliver products made only at plants that we have confirmed meet our standards.
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Thorough and Rapid Responses to Complaints
Product development and QA representatives examine potential risks for complaints during the development phase.
Should a customer have an issue with a product after release, we conduct an investigation to identify the cause and implement measures to prevent its recurrence.
In the case of a complaint for a severe issue, we transfer authority to the General Quality Committee directly overseen by our President to realize a swift response.
