How a California juice business ended up importing Norwegian fish.

Crown Prince, Inc. is a family-owned canned-seafood company based in City of Industry, California, and the company gives 1948 as its founding year. Its own account of how it began is unusual. The company says its founder, the Dutch-born Case Hoffman, started an orange-juice business with two friends after the Second World War, making juice under the “Cold Gold” label at a small plant in La Habra, California.

According to the company, the plant’s cost accountant was Norwegian and had a friend in Norway who wanted to sell Norwegian sardines in the United States, so for a time the partners sold juice and sardines side by side. When they sold the juice business they were left with a stock of sardines, and Hoffman set about selling it himself. The company says he made his first big sale in 1947, to the California grocery chain Alpha Beta, and that “with that sale, the company was born”, so its own history places the start a year before the founding date it uses.

Hoffman named the business Norwegian Fish Importers. The company says he was at first its only employee, delivering orders from the back of a station wagon, and built sales across southern California before hiring staff. His son Bob Hoffman joined in 1968, took on the administrative side and later became president, while Case Hoffman expanded sales into neighbouring states and then nationally. The company says Case Hoffman retired in 1989, by which time his grandchildren Dustan Hoffman, as president, and Larry DeMarco, as vice-president, had joined the business.

A sardine grade from Norway that became the company’s name.

The name came before the company used it. The company says its staple product in the Norwegian Fish Importers years was a sardine called Crown Prince, a name that came straight from Norway, where each type of sardine was sold under a name of its own. It was the most popular item with Hoffman’s customers, and in 1985, when the business had begun bringing in seafood from countries beyond Norway, it adopted “Crown Prince” as its company name, the company says, as a way to mark that change while keeping a nod to where it started.

The business now sells under three brand lines: Crown Prince, the original range of sardines, kipper snacks, clams and oysters; Crown Prince Natural, which the company presents as seafood without unnecessary additives or preservatives; and Ocean Prince. The company says it expanded into Mexico in 1993, and it runs a Spanish-language site for Crown Prince de México.

In October 2011 the company announced a line of pouch-packed sardines in four flavours, from Thailand, going into Wal-Mart stores nationwide and several regional grocery chains; the release quoted Dustan Hoffman as president.

The company describes itself as an American family-owned business guided by three generations of the Hoffman family, and in the same history says Dustan Hoffman is its president today.

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.

An importer that sources from packers around the world.

Crown Prince is an importer rather than a canner, and its own pages are specific about where its fish come from. The company says it works with seafood packers in nine countries, many of them family-owned. For the Crown Prince Natural line, it says its brisling sardines are caught by family-owned boats in the sea lochs of western Scotland and lightly smoked over hardwood; its yellowfin tuna is pole-caught in the Maldives and packed in Thailand; its anchovies and skinless, boneless sardines come from the Atlantic off Morocco; its kipper snacks come from a North East Atlantic fishery managed by the Canadian government; and its clam juice comes from the Wadden Sea and is bottled in the Netherlands by a Dutch family company. Some Crown Prince and Ocean Prince smoked oysters, clams and mackerel are products of China, the company’s own site notes.

The company says most of its products are kosher-certified by the Orthodox Union and that its tuna is certified dolphin-safe by the Earth Island Institute. It also says it set up a staff “Green Team” in 2010 to reduce its environmental impact and has reported to the Carbon Disclosure Project since that year.

The brand has had one documented recall in recent years. On 15 July 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration published Crown Prince’s voluntary recall of its Crown Prince Natural Smoked Baby Clams in Olive Oil, a product of China, after FDA testing found detectable levels of PFAS; no illnesses had been reported, and the FDA has since recorded the recall as completed.

The name is a common one: “Crown Prince” is a royal title and is used by unrelated products. The company’s sites are crownprince.com and crownprincenatural.com.

For a design guide, Crown Prince shows how a company can take its name from a single product, a sardine grade from Norway, and keep it through decades of sourcing far beyond that country. Compare King Oscar, the Norwegian sardine brand with a royal name, and Season Brand, another American sardine label. For this guide we use crown gold, royal navy and sardine silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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