Dr. Iichiroh Ohhira developed OM-X about 40 years ago, in 1977. During a business trip to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia Dr. Ohhira felt discomfort after taking some strong alcoholic beverage. A local young man recommended him trying a spoonful of "mysterious drink" to sober up. The drink was in paste form with a faintly fermenting smell.

He was initially sceptical but he recovered from his discomfort after taking the paste-like drink. Dr. Ohhira was shocked at what he experienced, so he chose to pursue advanced studies at the graduate school of Okayama University after returning to Japan and began to devote himself to research on fermentation. After many efforts, Dr. Ohhira worked hard through trial and error and finally found out the fact that the "mysterious drink" is in fact a food fermented by lactic acid bacteria. At that time, when the fermented foods were significantly less popular than nowadays, Dr. Ohhira continued his fermentation research deeply with the belief that "there must be some other unknown power in fermentation".

As a result, Dr. Ohhira focused on a large number of fermented foods in the Southeast Asia and investigated the characteristics of each lactic acid bacteria. After comparing the functionalities of 189 kinds of lactic acid bacteria which were isolated from many different fermented foods and repeating