A family restaurant, a Marin County market and a company named after its cook.

Annie Chun’s is an American brand of Asian-style packaged foods named after its founder, Annie Chun. CJ Foods, part of the South Korean group behind CJ CheilJedang, has owned it since 2009, and the brand’s website, checked in October 2026, presents a range of microwavable noodle bowls and credits its copyright to Schwan’s Sales Co., Inc. – Consumer Brands Division.

The story begins with a family restaurant and a farmers’ market. English Wikipedia says Chun emigrated to San Francisco in the late 1970s, where her family owned a Korean restaurant, and that in 1991 she began selling homemade Asian-inspired sauces at farmers’ markets in Marin County, north of the city. Forbes, in a profile by Marianne Lehnis published on 27 July 2023, also dates her start at the market to 1991 and quotes Chun recalling early mornings at the market as the start of the business.

In 1992, Wikipedia says, Chun founded Annie Chun’s Gourmet Foods with her husband, Stephen “Steve” Broad. In the 2023 Forbes profile Chun describes her role in those years as the creator and the salesperson, making cold calls to buyers, with Broad as her business partner. Broad tells the magazine that meeting shoppers face to face at the farmers’ market, rather than starting from data, shaped how the pair built the brand.

The company kept its founder at the centre of its public face. An archived copy of the brand’s website from January 2009, captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, is titled “Annie Chun’s Gourmet Foods” and opens with a personal welcome signed by Annie Chun. In it she says she created her Asian sauces and noodles for busy people who enjoy good food, and that they carry the flavours she grew up with in Korea and the flavours of the restaurant her family ran in San Francisco.

The North Bay Business Journal, in an article by Jeff Quackenbush published on 13 May 2013, reported that the brand had been based in Marin until it was sold. It said Chun’s face appeared on the Annie Chun’s label across a supermarket range that by then took in packaged noodles, instant rice, potstickers, sauces, sushi rolls and seaweed sheets.

A majority stake in 2005 and a full sale in 2009.

CJ came into the business in two steps. On 30 November 2005 the Korea JoongAng Daily reported that the Korean foodmaker CJ Corp. had acquired a majority stake in Annie Chun’s Inc., which the paper described as a San Francisco-based company selling Asian-style instant foods and sauce products. The paper quoted a CJ official saying the purchase was designed to take the group into the processed-food market in the United States.

The rest of the company followed four years later. The North Bay Business Journal reported on 13 May 2013 that Chun and Broad, husband and business partner, sold the brand in 2009 to South Korea-based CJ Foods, and that CJ had begun increasing the brand’s sales four years earlier through a distribution agreement. English Wikipedia describes CJ Foods as a subsidiary of CJ CheilJedang and also dates the sale to 2009.

The founders then turned to a new venture. The same 2013 report says that once a non-compete agreement had expired, the couple launched a seaweed-snack company, GimMe Health Foods, based in San Rafael and named after gim, the Korean word for dried, roasted seaweed. Wikipedia dates the founding of gimMe to 2012.

Annie Chun’s, meanwhile, stayed with CJ. English Wikipedia says CJ CheilJedang acquired the Minnesota food manufacturer Schwan’s Company in 2019, and the Annie Chun’s website, checked in October 2026, credits its copyright to Schwan’s Sales Co., Inc. – Consumer Brands Division. The recipes on that site pair the noodle bowls with products sold under CJ’s bibigo name, such as seaweed crisps and a hot and sweet gochujang.

Design and documentation.

Packaged bread and Asian-style grocery goods sit side by side in many American supermarkets, yet they reach shoppers through very different kinds of packaging. A sliced loaf usually travels in a soft, printed bag gathered at the neck and closed with a twist tie or a small plastic tag, so the bag itself has to carry the name, the variety and the colour cues that help a shopper pick one loaf from a long shelf of similar ones.

Asian-style sauces, by contrast, are often sold in glass or plastic bottles with a wrap-around or front label, while dried and fresh noodles come in flat bags, trays or boxes with a window or a photograph of the cooked dish. In both cases the label has to work at arm’s length, in an aisle where many similar products compete for attention.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent sources record about a brand — who started it, who has owned it and where its products are made — separately from what the company says about itself, and treats the palette shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official specification.

From a signed welcome in 2009 to “embrace the Slurp” in 2026.

The clearest constant in the Annie Chun’s identity is the founder herself. Her name is the brand name, written with a possessive, and the 2013 North Bay Business Journal report noted that her face appeared on the label of the packaged range. The 2009 website made the same personal promise in words, in a welcome written in her voice and signed with her name.

That welcome set out a clear proposition. Asian food, it said, was something many people loved to eat but found too tricky or too time-consuming to cook, and the sauces and noodles were made to be easy to use, without the need for recipes. The language was warm and conversational, closing with “Happy Eating!” above Chun’s name.

The current website keeps the name but speaks in a looser, more playful voice. Its home page invites shoppers to “embrace the Slurp”, says the noodles are steamed rather than fried, and asks visitors to sign up to a “Chun Club” mailing list for recipes and sweepstakes. Its product list runs through bowls such as Yakisoba, Miso Soup, Pad Thai and Pho Soup, and the site writes the mark in capitals, as ANNIE CHUN’S, with a registered-trademark symbol.

Between those two versions of the website sits the change of owner. The 2009 page still carried the Annie Chun’s Gourmet Foods name; the 2026 site credits a consumer-brands division inside CJ’s American business, and its recipe pages bring in bibigo products alongside the noodle bowls.

For a design guide, Annie Chun’s shows how a founder’s own name can carry a grocery brand from a Marin County farmers’ market to a range owned by a Korean food group. Compare it with CJ CheilJedang, the group behind its owner, and with Ka-Me, another American brand of Asian-style noodles and sauces. For this guide we use gochujang red, broth gold and scallion green on noodle cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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