A tuna company started by the people who catch the fish.

American Tuna is a tinned-seafood company from San Diego, California. The company says it was formed by six American pole-and-line fishing families in San Diego in 2005; FoodProductionDaily, reporting in January 2014, gave the founding year as 2007. Both accounts describe the same group: families who catch albacore one fish at a time with poles, lines and barbless hooks rather than nets.

The company’s fish come from a fleet with its own history of certification. The American Albacore Fishing Association (AAFA), a San Diego non-profit fishermen’s marketing association, was certified by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2007, the MSC said in January 2013, when the fishery was re-certified for both North and South Pacific albacore. The MSC described the association’s members as fishing with pole-and-line and troll gear and barbless hooks, with no nets and no contact with the sea floor. The same release said AAFA had decided in 2004 to pursue certification and named Natalie Webster as its executive director. In May 2014 the MSC described Webster as a member of one of American Tuna’s founding families, and FoodProductionDaily identified her as the brand’s spokesperson. Edible San Diego reported in May 2018 that American Tuna buys its pole-caught albacore from vessels belonging to AAFA.

The company says it began in two Whole Foods Market stores in San Diego and has since spread to Whole Foods stores nationwide as well as other retailers, restaurants and delis. FoodProductionDaily reported in 2014 that food service, including sandwich shops and the restaurants of zoos and aquariums, was then its biggest line of business. Zingerman’s, the Ann Arbor food business, named Joshua Graves as American Tuna’s longtime general manager in an August 2026 article.

An illustrated fishing scene, a sign-painter’s type and a boat’s name on every can.

The clearest documented piece of the brand’s design came with a retail launch. In May 2014 the MSC announced that American Tuna was launching two brands, Pole & Line tuna and Deck Hand Premium Cat Food, exclusively in Whole Foods Market stores across the United States, using fish from the MSC-certified US pole-and-line albacore fishery and the MSC-certified Maldivian pole-and-line fishery. The range included albacore and skipjack packs.

The Dieline published the packaging in June 2015 and credited it to the design agency Moxie Sozo, which had been asked to create a brand for exclusive distribution at Whole Foods. It described an illustration on the pack that tells the story of the pole-and-line method, a palette of blue, yellow and white, and lettering it likened to the store signs of a remote fishing town. It also noted thin lines wrapped around the ampersand so that it reads as an extension of a fisherman’s line, and a label on each can naming the captain, the ship and the year the fish was caught.

That idea of tracing a can to a boat runs through the company’s own story. FoodProductionDaily reported in 2014 that each can could be traced to the vessel that caught the fish, and Edible San Diego wrote in 2018 that the labelling let buyers trace each can to its boat and captain. Zingerman’s wrote in 2026 that the company’s small tins are labelled by boat, and featured albacore caught by the Widgeon, a vessel based in Newport, Oregon.

The company’s current packs carry several outside marks. American Tuna lists the MSC label, a dolphin-safe mark and the “one-by-one” mark of the International Pole & Line Foundation among the certifications on its products.

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.

Cooked once, in the can.

The product’s other distinguishing point is how it is cooked. The company says its albacore is hand-filleted and packed raw by small canners in Oregon and Washington and then cooked just once, in the can, so the fish’s own juices stay in the tin and no water is added. FoodProductionDaily reported in 2014 that the tuna was then processed at an Oregon “micro-canner,” and Zingerman’s described the same raw-pack method in 2026. The company says all of its seafood is caught by US-flagged vessels, and it also sells canned salmon that it says comes mainly from Alaska, Oregon and Washington.

The name needs a little care online, since “American tuna” is also an ordinary descriptive phrase; the company’s own site is americantuna.com.

For a design guide, American Tuna shows how a small company can build a whole identity out of who caught the fish: a pack illustration of the fishing method, a sign-painter’s lettering and a boat’s name on every can. Compare Wild Planet, the Californian pole-and-line tuna brand, and Fishwife, the illustrated American tinned-fish label. For this guide we use Pacific blue, albacore yellow and sail white with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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