A chemist, a bowl of dashi and a patent.

Ajinomoto began with a taste. Kikunae Ikeda, a chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University who had studied in Leipzig in the laboratory of Wilhelm Ostwald, set out to find what gave kombu dashi, the kelp broth of Japanese cooking, its distinctive flavour. The company says the question came to him over a bowl of boiled tofu in kombu dashi. In 1908, English Wikipedia says, he identified glutamate as the source of a taste he named umami, distinct from sweet, sour, salty and bitter, and developed a way to make a seasoning from it; Japanese Wikipedia dates his patent for the manufacturing process to the same year. In 1985 the Japan Patent Office named him one of ten great Japanese inventors.

The businessman was Saburosuke Suzuki II. Japanese Wikipedia says he set up a family partnership, Suzuki Pharmaceutical, in 1907, and that general sales of the new seasoning began on 20 May 1909, the date the company treats as its founding day; English Wikipedia says it was first presented at a new-products exhibition in Tokyo that April. The name AJI-NO-MOTO means “essence of taste.” Output grew from 4.7 tons in 1910 to 23.3 tons in 1913, English Wikipedia says. The first bottles, Japanese Wikipedia notes, were borrowed from pharmacy use because no suitable container was yet available.

The company says Ikeda and Suzuki shared a wish to improve the nutrition of the Japanese people, an idea it now sums up in its slogan, “Eat Well, Live Well.”

From kanji and S to a single red word.

Ajinomoto’s marks are unusually well recorded. Until 1970, Japanese Wikipedia says, the company’s emblem combined the kanji 三 and the letter S, the initials of Suzuki Saburosuke. On 1 September 1970 it was replaced by a mark designed by the graphic designer Mitsuo Katsui, a lowercase “a” reversed out of a solid disc, which appeared on share certificates, pharmaceutical packs and the company’s rail tank cars. English Wikipedia’s record of the brand identity adds an early registered trademark known as “Lady & AJI-NO-MOTO,” and credits a logo used from 1973 to 1986 to the American designer Saul Bass.

In January 1986 the consumer mark changed from “Ajinomoto KK” to AJINOMOTO on a black base, Japanese Wikipedia says. In October 1999 that gave way to the current logo on a red base, with the slogan “Ashita no moto AJINOMOTO.” For its centenary in 2009 the company introduced “Eat Well, Live Well.,” adopted as the corporate slogan in 2010, and from 2010 it used the opening “A” of the logo as its corporate emblem.

The latest change came in October 2017, when a press release announced a group-wide global brand logo combining an A and a j, with the AJINOMOTO wordmark made bolder; a new corporate emblem followed from January 2018, along with a sound logo in which the global logo is drawn in a single stroke. Packs adopted it gradually, beginning with a redesigned Cook Do range. The pack itself has changed too: in 1951 a shaker with holes replaced the plain bottle, and the current 70-gram bottle is shaped as the AjiPanda character.

Japan’s seasoning makers.

The seven brands in this group all make condiments and seasonings, and all of them come from Japan: Mizkan, Ajinomoto, S&B, Kagome, Otafuku, Bull-Dog and Yamasa. Japanese condiment and seasoning brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to companies that have grown into much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood shop to a restaurant kitchen.

A condiment brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the dish it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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 bottled.

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.

Kawasaki, Saga and the world.

The company took its present shape slowly. Japanese Wikipedia traces it through a series of names: the partnership became Suzuki Shoten in 1912 (unrelated to the trading house of the same name), a joint-stock Suzuki Shoten was established in 1917, and after wartime renaming the company became Ajinomoto Co. in 1946. It opened a factory at Kawasaki in 1914; the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 destroyed that plant and the head office, Japanese Wikipedia says. The district around it, Suzuki-cho, is named after the founder. The raw material moved from wheat to soybeans and later to fermentation of sugar sources such as cane molasses and tapioca starch, according to English Wikipedia.

The range widened after the war: the HON-DASHI bonito seasoning in 1970, frozen foods from 1972 and the Cook Do Chinese sauce range in 1978. Through a 1960s alliance with CPC International, Ajinomoto began selling Knorr soups in Japan, and English Wikipedia lists it as still selling Knorr there under licence from Unilever. In 2015, the Nikkei and a company release reported, refining of AJI-NO-MOTO ended at Kawasaki and moved to Indonesia and Brazil, with blending and packing kept in Japan; Japanese Wikipedia says domestic production now takes place at the Kyushu plant in Saga.

MSG has long attracted public debate. In 2020 Ajinomoto joined a campaign, #RedefineCRS, against what it calls a myth about the seasoning, English Wikipedia says. Today Ajinomoto Co., Inc. is listed in Tokyo, with its head office in Chuo ward, and also makes amino acids and an insulating film used in semiconductor packaging.

For a design guide, Ajinomoto shows how a product name became a corporate brand, carried by a run of documented logos. Compare Kikkoman, Japan’s soy-sauce maker, and Maggi, the Swiss seasoning brand of the 1886 Würze bottle. For this guide we use a red, a black and a white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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