A Manila trader and a California licensor.

Ligo is a Philippine canned-food brand best known for its sardines, and for most of its history it was a brand the family behind it did not own. It is made and sold by the company of the Tung family, which the brand’s website names as A. Tung Chingco Manufacturing Corporation, with its main office in Caloocan City, Metro Manila. The business was founded by Gregory Tung Sr. as A. Tung Chingco Trading, Inc., and its first role, the company says, was as the exclusive Philippine distributor of Ligo products for Liberty Gold Fruit Co., Inc. of California.

The company’s own accounts differ on the starting date. From at least 2001 to 2009 its website said that A. Tung Chingco had been the exclusive distributor of Ligo products in the Philippines “since 1945.” Its later “Our Legacy” page, captured in 2020, says the journey began in 1954, when Gregory Tung Sr. partnered with Liberty Gold to become Ligo’s exclusive Philippine distributor, and the site’s copyright line of that year runs from 1954. Both versions credit the partnership with making Ligo a market leader in Philippine canned fish.

The step from distributor to maker came around 1980. The company says that, with demand growing, it decided to put up its own cannery so that Ligo Sardines and Ligo Mackerel could be produced locally, and that it kept strict quality-control standards throughout the plant. Its 2020 history credits the cannery to the second generation, Gregory Tung Jr., and calls the manufacturing plant his legacy. In the mid-1980s, under Gregory Tung Jr., the company says it strengthened its marketing and manufacturing and moved into meat, adding Ligo Corned Beef alongside new sardine and mackerel variants and Ligo Squid.

Quality first, and a licence brought home.

“Quality First” was the company’s stated motto in the 2000s. Its website of that period called it “our golden rule in business success” and said its aim was to make quality products that were affordable. It also said Ligo Sardines and Mackerel were being exported to the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the Pacific Rim, and in 2001 it described a wider range that ran from sardines and squid to canned and dried fruits, snack items and canned juices.

The brand collected consumer and marketing awards in that decade, which the company listed on its site. The Manila Bulletin reported in October 2005 that Ligo Sardines was one of 20 brands awarded Superbrands status for 2005–2006, at a ceremony at the Mandarin Oriental in Manila on 27 September 2005. The newspaper said the selection combined a nationwide consumer survey by the research firm Synovate with an assessment by a Superbrands Philippines Council drawn from the media and branding industry. The company also listed an Advertiser of the Year award for A. Tung Chingco Trading at the 19th Philippine Advertising Congress in Cebu in November 2005, and 2004 Philippine Marketing Excellence Awards for Ligo hot sardines and Ligo Corned Beef, along with a run of consumer-group awards from 2001 to 2005 naming Ligo a top canned-sardines brand.

The biggest change to the brand itself came in 2018. According to the company’s 2020 history, that year “the Tung family finally acquired the Ligo license from California-based Liberty Gold.” The same year the company launched Sriracha Sardines, which it says became an instant hit with consumers. By 2019 it had announced further variants, among them Calamansi, Fried Sardines in Oyster Sauce and Portuguese Style, and a dried-fish line, Ligo Tuyo, for the end of that year.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are food and drink brands from the Philippines and Thailand: Jack ’n Jill, Ligo, Mega, Oishi, Goldilocks, Lactasoy and Dutch Mill. Food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood store to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the snack, meal or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A third generation and a cast of endorsers.

Ligo is now run by the third generation of the Tung family. The company’s 2020 history names three brothers: Mikko Tung, vice-president for operations, who oversees production; Mark Tung, vice-president for sales and marketing; and Macky Tung, vice-president for advertising and promotions. It describes their aim as taking the brand further through innovation, building on the manufacturing plant that their father established and on the company their grandfather founded.

Under them the brand has leaned on regional campaigns and well-known endorsers. In 2018, the company says, it launched the “Odong Nga Lami” campaign in Mindanao, in which brand ambassador Tom Rodriguez is shown enjoying odong noodles, which the company calls a popular local dish, with Ligo sardines. A sequel, “Odong Mas Lami,” featuring Carla Abellana, followed in mid-2019. The company then added Beauty Gonzales to what it calls its growing family of celebrity endorsers, to promote the Sriracha, Calamansi, Fried Sardines in Oyster Sauce and Portuguese Style variants.

For a design guide, Ligo shows how a distributor’s licensed name became a family-made and, from 2018, family-owned brand across three generations. Compare Century Tuna, the Manila canner founded in 1978, and Mega Sardines, another Philippine sardine brand. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a sauce red and a tin silver with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ligo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.