A San Pedro cannery, and a name borrowed from the fishermen.

Chicken of the Sea dates itself to 1914 and a cannery in San Pedro, the port district of Los Angeles. English Wikipedia says Gilbert Van Camp, a son of Frank Van Camp, moved there that year and bought the California Tuna Canning Company, renaming it the Van Camp Sea Food Company; the company’s own timeline likewise gives 1914 as the year it began, as Van Camp Seafood.

The brand name came from the boats. The company says that in the early 1900s tuna fishermen called white albacore “the chicken of the sea” for its mild flavour and light colour, and English Wikipedia, citing an archived company FAQ, gives the same explanation. The sources differ on when the name went on the cans: the company’s timeline says the first Chicken of the Sea products reached store shelves in 1930, while English Wikipedia, citing a 2010 Harvard Business Press book, says the company adopted the slogan in the 1950s.

Ownership changed several times. English Wikipedia says Ralston Purina bought Van Camp in 1963 and sold the division in 1988 to the Indonesian firm PT Mantrust, after which the insurer Prudential, the main creditor, became majority owner. In 1997 an investment group, Tri-Union Seafoods, bought the company, the same article says; its partners were Thai Union, Edmund A. Gann and Tri-Marine, and the business was renamed Chicken of the Sea International. English Wikipedia’s article on Thai Union describes the 1997 purchase as the Thai company’s first overseas investment, and says Thai Union became sole owner in 2000, when its partners sold their half. Thai Union Group, based in Samut Sakhon, Thailand, has owned the brand outright since then. The Thai company itself was founded in 1977 as Asian Pacific Thai Tuna, according to the same encyclopedia.

A mermaid since 1952, redrawn in 2023.

The brand’s figure is a mermaid. The company says its mermaid mascot debuted in 1952 and was modelled on the actress Grace Lee Whitney, later known as Yeoman Janice Rand in Star Trek. English Wikipedia names the mermaid Catalina, describes her as blonde and holding a golden scepter, and cites Whitney’s 1998 memoir The Longest Trek for her place as the original model.

In January 2023 the brand introduced what Transform magazine called its first complete overhaul in more than 20 years. The New York agency Little Big Brands handled the strategy, design, packaging and launch campaign. Catalina was redrawn in a more modern illustration style and moved away from the centre of the logo, which let the wordmark be stacked and enlarged; on pack, a white clamshell replaced the gradient burst that the agency called dated. Andy Mecs, the company’s executive vice-president for commercial, described the wordmark as set “in a simpler, red font against a white background,” and said the company “needed to evolve our brand icon, Catalina, for the digital age,” Advertising Week’s AW360 reported. John Nunziato, Little Big Brands’ chief creative officer, told Transform that the aim was to evolve the brand respectfully and give Catalina a more empowered persona.

The launch line was “Wild-Caught Happiness,” and the pack copy was pared back to claims such as “wild-caught.” The website’s title line is now “Eat Healthy. Live Happy.” The company’s timeline also lists a dolphin-safe policy, “The Mermaid Cares,” from 1990, and founding membership of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation in 2009.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all American names in tinned seafood: StarKist, Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, Safe Catch, American Tuna, Crown Prince and Season. Tinned-fish brands sit at many different points in the trade, from long-established household names on supermarket shelves to smaller companies built around a single fishery or a single product.

Several of the best-known American names now belong to groups based outside the United States. English Wikipedia records that South Korea’s Dongwon Industries bought StarKist from Del Monte Foods in 2008, that Taiwan’s FCF acquired Bumble Bee in 2020, and that Thailand’s Thai Union became the sole owner of Chicken of the Sea in 2000; Moroccan reports in 2021 recorded the purchase of Season by the Casablanca group Mutandis. A tinned-fish brand’s identity is therefore often carried less by a single factory than by a label, a name and a mascot, because the company behind the name may have changed hands and its fish may be caught and packed far from where the brand began.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fish is caught and canned. 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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From American Samoa to Georgia, and a leniency deal.

Production moved in 2009. In May that year Thai Union Frozen Products, as the parent was then called, announced that it would move canning for the brand from American Samoa to Lyons, Georgia, where it bought a vacant 200,000-square-foot building in the Toombs County industrial park; the move was completed in October 2009, Packaging Gateway reported. The Georgia plant brings in frozen tuna loins through the Port of Savannah and cans them. The closure in American Samoa cost nearly 2,000 jobs, and Tri Marine International bought the old facility in October 2010, the same source says. In May 2018 the company moved its headquarters from San Diego to El Segundo, California, English Wikipedia says.

The brand also has a documented legal history. In August 2015 a New York wholesale grocery co-operative sued Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee and StarKist, alleging that they had fixed prices, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, and in December 2015 Thai Union abandoned a planned purchase of Bumble Bee after the US Justice Department raised concerns. In September 2017 Thai Union told the Stock Exchange of Thailand that Tri-Union, Chicken of the Sea’s parent, had received conditional leniency under the Justice Department’s Corporate Leniency Program over its investigation of the packaged-seafood industry, SeafoodNews reported, meaning no criminal fines or jail time for Tri-Union’s employees and officers. Separately, in March 2016 the company recalled canned tuna in the US that had been undercooked because of an equipment malfunction, Food Safety News reported.

For a design guide, Chicken of the Sea shows how a single character can carry a brand for seven decades, redrawn rather than replaced. Compare Bumble Bee, the brand Thai Union tried to buy in 2015, and John West, Thai Union’s British tinned-fish name. For this guide we use wordmark red, ocean blue and clamshell white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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