Earlier this month, Steve Ueda met with employees of Suisan’s fish market. The newest president and CEO of the 110-year-old company, Ueda listened to outgoing president and board chairman Glenn Hashimoto introduce him, and looked up at a monitor installed in the market, where old photos of the fish market in its early days — aku boats and all — flashed by.
“It made me reflect on how we started,” Ueda, 48, said last week. In 1907, a group of Japanese immigrants, including Ueda’s great-grandfather Kamezo Matsuno, pooled their money to get the fish market off the ground.
The original market is still there, having weathered two tsunamis. And although fish sales remain the public face of Suisan, the company itself has expanded considerably. As a food distributor, it has more than 1,000 wholesale customers islandwide.
“There’s still elements of what those initial Japanese guys did,” Ueda said. “I was thinking — would they recognize what the company is today? Over these 110 years we’ve changed so much.”
Ueda’s focus in his new role is on the next 110 years, but says that in order to succeed, the history has to remain in sight.
“I’m stepping on the shoulders of the work that all these people have done,” he said. “We do a lot of things well, and just doing those things better, I think, will propel us into the next century of business.”
Born and raised in Honolulu, Ueda spent summers on the Big Island. His earliest memories of Suisan are fishing on the pier and getting Slush Puppies and sashimi at the market. As a teenager, he worked in the warehouse unloading containers and on truck delivery routes maneuvering handcarts stacked high with boxes into restaurant walk-in refrigerators.
“I just remember that was tough for me,” he said. “I was a little 110-pound kid, and this hand truck is maybe twice my weight!”
But growing up, Ueda didn’t plan to become the chief of the family business. He was more interested in cars.
“That was the thing: cool hot rods, drag racing,” he said. Still, grandfather Rex Matsuno, Suisan’s sixth president, certainly hinted at the possibility of a Suisan career.
“From when I was a kid he would always throw things out, like ‘One day you might be running this,’ and that kind of thing,” Ueda said. “So it was always there.”
When it came time to decide what to study in college, Ueda’s mother encouraged him to chart his own course.
“She told me … really, just follow your heart. Do what you enjoy doing,” Ueda recalled.
He studied engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology before working for Ford Motor Co. for six years, moving from Michigan to the United Kingdom to Ohio and back to Michigan.
“At the time, I still wasn’t thinking about (Suisan), but I knew I wanted to be closer to Hawaii,” Ueda said. He moved to Los Angeles to be near his future wife, Debi Nakamura, and attended business school at the University of California at Irvine.
He began to think about Suisan.
“In one of the final classes (of business school), we had to do a project, and for whatever reason, I picked (one) looking at one of our product lines here, marketing ahi,” Ueda said.
In 2006, Ueda met with Hashimoto and Suisan general manager Kyle Kawano about future leadership in the family business. The next year, he and his wife moved to Hawaii Island.
During the past 10 years, Ueda has been a Suisan distributor sales representative, buyer, account manager and, most recently, vice president.
The shift from engineering proved less of a jump than Ueda anticipated, partially because the problem-solving mentality cultivated throughout that career proved an asset.
“It worked nicely, and it was kind of fulfilling … I can still contribute in a way that’s unique to the company,” Ueda said. One of his goals has been increasing intradepartmental collaborations and improving transparency within the company: “What management is thinking and engaging with employees.”
Past president Hashimoto is staying on as an executive advisor.
“We’re really lucky because Glenn … is willing to stay on board,” Ueda said. “He’s going to focus on our business strategy and business development. In his final years with us, he’s going to help continue that building part.”
“We want to continue a lot of the tradition, and … contribute more,” he said. “Because really, Hawaii Island is our home.”
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
