The middle brand of a young Matosinhos cannery.

Ati Manel is a Portuguese tinned-fish brand made by 100 Mistérios Lda, the company behind José Gourmet. Conservas de Portugal, a research project that catalogues the country’s canneries and their brands, lists 100 Mistérios as the packer, the client and the registered owner of the Ati Manel brand. It gives the company’s founding year as 2008 and places its factory at Perafita, in the municipality of Matosinhos, describing the business as a packer of canned fish in olive oil.

The company’s own account, reproduced in that archive entry, says 100 Mistérios began with the JOSE Gourmet brand, with the aim of reviving what its founders saw as a declining Portuguese canning industry, and that it went on to build its own factory. It then added brands for different parts of the market: Maria Organic for organic products, ATI Manel for what the company calls a balance between price and quality, and ABC+ for more adventurous cooking. In 2025 it launched Iconic Sardine, a brand given over to sardines alone. The José Gourmet website lists ABC+, ATI Manel and Maria Organic as its sister brands.

An outside visitor described the same shift. In September 2022 Caputo’s, a delicatessen in Salt Lake City that imports Portuguese tins, published an account of a visit to the factory by its owner, Matt Caputo. He wrote that José Gourmet had “started as just a brand buying from other canneries” and had since opened what he called Portugal’s newest and smallest cannery, and that most of its capacity went to traditional methods used for José Gourmet and Ati Manel. He described the founder he met, Adriano, as a commercial airline pilot, and said the company hired workers let go by larger factories and bought its fish at the auctions every day.

A cellar of stamps, plates and recipe books.

Ati Manel tells its own story in the first person, on its website, in the voice of a designer writing about a great-grandfather known as Ati Manel. The narrator says he never met the man or tasted his tins, but grew up hearing about him and about a canning business that had started with difficulty. The text places the business against the history of the industry as the brand tells it: a boom during the First World War, some four hundred factories in the mid-1920s, fewer than half that by the late 1930s, and demand rising again during the Second World War, when Ati Manel is said to have sent small parcels of tins to friends abroad. He lived, the text says, to see the prosperity of the 1950s.

The heart of the story is an archive. When the family divided an inheritance, the narrator writes, they opened a trapdoor to the cellar of a house at Reveles and found ledgers alongside the tools of label printing: stamps, zinc engravings, silkscreen frames, photographic films, wooden type, cutting dies, colour proofs, printing blocks, lithographic stones, offset plates and boxes of labels. There were also notebooks — one of preserving formulas and recipes, one of notes on markets abroad, one of contacts for agents, producers and fishermen — and letters from several countries commenting on the tins.

As a designer, the narrator says, the archive fell to him. He cleaned and sorted it, recovered the alphabets and the palettes, rebuilt the screens, patterns and dots, and adapted the graphic approach to the rules of markets in different countries, while keeping what he calls the spirit and visual world of his great-grandfather’s era. The same text says the recipes were treated the same way, with attention to the old notes on suppliers, fish auctions and fishermen. All of this is the brand’s own telling.

The José Gourmet website, for its part, names the designer Luís Mendonça as responsible for all of the company’s design and art direction from the start.

Portugal’s canning towns.

The seven brands in this group are Iberian tinned-fish names, six from Portugal and one from Galicia: Ramirez, Porthos, Ati Manel, Tricana, Bom Petisco, Briosa and Cuca. Canned fish in Portugal is closely tied to the coast and its fishing ports; English Wikipedia notes, for example, that production and exports of canned fish in Matosinhos, north of Porto, rose during the world wars and peaked between 1940 and 1960, and that the industry began to decline between 1970 and 1989, when several factories closed.

A tinned-fish brand’s identity is usually carried less by the fish than by the tin itself: its printed wrapper or lid, the name, and the town or harbour it promises. Behind those labels the trade is often less simple than it looks, because a single cannery may pack several brands of its own, a brand may outlive the factory that first used it, and an old name may pass from one family or group to another. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fish is actually canned.

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

Old type, new tins.

The range on the Ati Manel website runs from sardines in olive oil, plain, with lemon or spiced, to smoked sardines, tuna and mackerel fillets, mussels in escabeche, octopus in garlic sauce, squid, razor clams, scallops in a caldeirada sauce, small horse mackerel and smoked-fish pâtés. The brand’s own story names several of these — the razor clams, the scallops, the sardines in olive oil, the mussels in escabeche and the octopus in garlic — as dishes whose old methods it set out to recover from the notebooks. Its website carries the line “Peixe de Qualidade. Comércio Justo.” — quality fish, fair trade — which is the company’s own wording rather than a certification named on the site.

Within 100 Mistérios the brands are divided by purpose rather than by factory. José Gourmet carries the company’s illustrated tins and its widest range; Maria Organic covers organic products; ABC+ is aimed at more adventurous cooking; Iconic Sardine, launched in 2025, is devoted to one fish. Ati Manel is the brand the company places between price and quality, and it is the one built on a family archive rather than on commissioned illustration.

For a design guide, Ati Manel shows how a young cannery can borrow the visual language of an older one — recovered alphabets, palettes and printing patterns — while saying plainly who makes the tins today. Compare José Gourmet, its sister brand from the same company, and Tricana, a Lisbon shop brand whose wrappers were redrawn without changing them. For this guide we use navy, cream and a tomato red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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