Originally founded in 1923 as Kuramoto General Store, Kuramoto Ice was established during the third generation of family ownership, when we decided to focus solely on manufacturing high-quality ice for restaurants and bars. Since then, our company has embraced customer feedback, continuously adjusted our products to satisfy our customers’ needs, and developed exquisite and highly functional ice. One such product is “Kachiwari L.” Originally, many cocktail bars in Japan would purchase blocks of ice that they then cut to desired size. Aiming to simplify our customers’ operations, in 1970 Kuramoto Ice started offering “Kachiwari L,” large-sized artisanal hand-cracked ice (about the size of a fist). Currently, we offer custom cuts to meet a variety of customers’ needs. In 2015, we established a new ice manufacturing plant with a production capacity of 10 tons a day and strengthened our hygiene and safety protocols so that our customers can fully enjoy our high-quality ice with peace of mind.

Kuramoto Ice is a well-established, family-owned company with about 100 years of history, and is the oldest ice manufacturer in the city of Kanazawa. We also like to say we are the newest, as we have kept our business vital for a century by being flexible and constantly evolving with the changing times. Our logo, the hexagon, embodies this strength and perseverance. The hexagon is considered a symbol of powerful evolution and innate strength nature. For example, honeycomb is comprised of many contiguous hexagons, and is one of the sturdiest structures in nature. Cells represent the building blocks of life and are also hexagonal in shape. And ice crystals, despite appearing to take many shapes, derive their infinite beauty from their underlying hexagonal structure. In the Kuramoto Ice logo, the six differently-colored triangles represent the staff members who all face the same direction together, ready to continue evolving with the times.