A food salesman, a crop of bean sprouts and his mother’s recipes.

Chun King was an American brand of canned and frozen Chinese-American foods, built in Minnesota by Jeno Paulucci, the son of Italian immigrants to the state’s Iron Range. Its story starts not with chow mein but with bean sprouts.

MinnPost, in a history by the economists Louis D. Johnston and Susan E. Riley published on 19 May 2021, says Paulucci was travelling northern Minnesota in the early 1940s as a salesman for a food wholesaler when he noticed a product in grocery stores that his company did not carry: bean sprouts, used by home cooks making chop suey and chow mein. After an early failed attempt with soybeans rather than mung beans, the article says, he raised money from friends and contacts in 1943 so that he and a partner could start a company called Foo Young, which grew and packaged bean sprouts. By 1945 Foo Young was mixing the sprouts with celery, pimentos, water chestnuts and other vegetables to make canned chop suey vegetables.

The Chicago Tribune, reporting in June 1989, gave a slightly different account, drawn from a 1987 interview with Paulucci. It said Chun King was founded in 1946, began when Paulucci spotted bean sprouts at a Minneapolis delicatessen and found they could be grown in metal vats, and started in a corrugated Quonset hut. The Minneapolis Star Tribune also gave 1946 as the year Paulucci launched the brand, in January 2002.

The recipes came from home. MinnPost says that by the late 1940s Paulucci saw more profit in canned chop suey and chow mein than in raw ingredients, and brought in his mother, Michelina Paulucci, to create the recipes; quoting earlier books on Minnesota entrepreneurs, it describes the result as “Chinese food with an Italian accent.” The Chicago Tribune quoted Paulucci more bluntly: “I gave people an Italian chow mein.” Foo Young was renamed the Chun King Company, MinnPost says.

Duluth, the egg-roll machine and the pizza roll.

Chun King grew beyond cans. MinnPost says that by the late 1950s the company had expanded into frozen foods and, following the example of the TV dinner, created frozen Chinese dinners pairing chow mein or chop suey with white rice and a small egg roll. The egg roll needed a machine: the Chun King factory in Duluth hired an engineer, Eugene Luoma, to design one that extruded filling onto a continuous sheet of egg-roll skin, then folded, sealed and cut it, the article says, and the company went on to sell packs of frozen mini egg rolls on their own.

That machine led to another brand. In the mid-1960s, MinnPost says, Paulucci wanted to move into frozen pizza and asked his research staff to find new fillings for the egg-roll wrapper. The task went to Beatrice Ojakangas, a newly hired product developer at Chun King and Luoma’s older sister, who tested dozens of fillings; the pizza-flavoured versions became Jeno’s Pizza Rolls. Paulucci sold Jeno’s to Pillsbury in 1985, and in 1993 Pillsbury moved the pizza rolls under the Totino’s name, the article says.

Chun King’s advertising drew on comedy. English Wikipedia’s article on the satirist and adman Stan Freberg says he made Chun King advertisements and hosted an ABC television special, Stan Freberg Presents the Chun King Chow Mein Hour, broadcast on 4 February 1962.

Production also reached the East Coast. The Baltimore Sun reported in April 1995 that Chun King’s food-processing plant in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore, had been operating since 1962.

Then Paulucci sold. MinnPost says that in November 1966 he sold Chun King to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, and that one condition of the sale was that Reynolds would produce and package pizza rolls for Jeno’s. The Chicago Tribune said in 1989 that Paulucci had walked away from an earlier deal with the same buyer before completing the sale in 1966.

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.

A brand passed between a tobacco company, a Singapore food group and its rival’s owner.

Under Reynolds, Chun King changed hands inside the group several times. The Star Tribune, tracing the history on 2 January 2002, said Reynolds acquired Del Monte in 1980 and passed Chun King to its Del Monte operation; in 1985 Reynolds, by then RJR Nabisco, folded Del Monte into its newly acquired Nabisco brands. In 1986, the newspaper said, RJR Nabisco sold its frozen-food business, including licensing rights to Chun King frozen products, to ConAgra, and moved canned Chun King to Nabisco in Parsippany, New Jersey.

The canned business then went abroad. The Chicago Tribune reported on 22 June 1989 that RJR Nabisco, reducing debt after its buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, would sell its Chun King foods division to Yeo Hiap Seng and Fullerton Holdings, a subsidiary of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. The sale covered the Chun King trademark, sauce-making equipment in Canada and production facilities in Cambridge, Maryland, and in Ontario; Chun King’s range then included dinners, soy sauce, water chestnuts, chow mein noodles, bamboo shoots and bean sprouts. The Star Tribune later explained that KKR already owned Beatrice and its Hunt-Wesson unit, maker of the competing La Choy.

The Singapore years were short. Asiaweek reported on 28 July 1995 that Yeo Hiap Seng had announced in March the sale of Chun King assets to Hunt-Wesson of California. The Baltimore Sun reported on 4 April 1995 that Hunt-Wesson, owned by ConAgra, had bought the Chun King name and trademark the previous week, that the Cambridge plant would close that summer, and that Hunt-Wesson was considering moving the manufacturing to a plant it owned in Ohio. In January 2002 the Star Tribune said the brand had “virtually disappeared”: a spokesperson for ConAgra Grocery Products told the paper that Chun King was no longer distributed nationally and was sold in parts of the Northwest. English Wikipedia now describes Chun King as a former American brand and lists it among defunct brands.

For a design guide, Chun King shows how a brand’s founding story, an Italian-American family’s take on Chinese-American food, can outlast the brand on the shelf, and how one factory’s machinery produced a second brand. Compare Yeo’s, the Singapore company that owned Chun King from 1989 to 1995, and Totino’s, home of the pizza rolls that began on Chun King’s egg-roll line. For this guide we use chow mein red, noodle gold and pine green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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