A family name, a colour and a chieftain on the label.

Datu Puti began as a single product: a white vinegar. A 2011 history published by Yahoo! Southeast Asia says Datu Puti vinegar came onto the market in 1975, owned by the Reyes family, and calls it one of the earliest local condiment brands to invest in advertising and promotions. Its present owner, NutriAsia, says the brand was created by Hernan Reyes in 1975 and calls it the pioneer of the vinegar industry.

The name is often taken for a reference to history. There was a Datu Puti in Philippine tradition: Yahoo! describes him as one of the ten Bornean datus said to have arrived in Iloilo before the Spanish colonisation. But the same article says that chieftain has no connection with how the vinegar was named. According to Yahoo!, “Datu” was the surname of the mother of the family that introduced the product, and “puti” is the Filipino word for white, the colour of traditional sukang paombong, the palm vinegar from which the brand is derived. English Wikipedia, citing the same article, gives the same account.

With a name like that, the logo followed. Yahoo! called the choice of a datu for the logo “a no-brainer,” and English Wikipedia describes the mark as the image of a precolonial datu. The first Mukhasim television advertisements, in the early 1980s, put their star in datu clothes as well.

For more than twenty years the brand meant vinegar. Yahoo! dates Datu Puti Soy Sauce to 1996 and adds that the soy sauce would apparently otherwise have been named “Datu Itim,” itim being Filipino for black. Datu Puti Patis, a fish sauce, followed in 1999. By 2011 the range also included a spiced vinegar, a sugar cane vinegar, a lighter soy sauce and a premium fish sauce, and The Philippine Star listed white and cane vinegar, soy, fish and oyster sauce under the brand in 2014.

Pugak, Eat Bulaga and a nation pulling faces.

Datu Puti’s advertising is built on an expression rather than a smile. The campaign is called “Mukhasim,” a blend of the Filipino words mukha, face, and asim, sour, so that it means “sour face.” Yahoo! wrote in 2011 that the idea paved the way for the brand’s mass recognition, and NutriAsia today describes Datu Puti as best known for coining the term.

The first Mukhasim campaign ran in the early 1980s. It starred an elderly Conrado Piring, better known as Pugak, of the comic duo Pugak and Tugak that rose to fame in the 1950s, dressed in datu clothes and pulling the face of someone who has just tasted something very sour. Yahoo! says it was Pugak’s face that viewers remembered and that the brand brought it back time and again. In the 1980s the campaign also ran as a sponsored segment on the noontime television show Eat Bulaga, where studio viewers competed to make the best Mukhasim face for prizes.

Later campaigns kept the format and changed the faces. According to Yahoo!, the actress Judy Ann Santos appeared in 2008. In 2009 a “Mukhasim Facetival” commercial featured the television stars Ina Raymundo, Carmi Martin and Eula Valdez, and invited viewers to send in their own sour faces for a chance to appear in a new advertisement. In 2011 the brand signed the boxer Manny Pacquiao and his mother, Dionisia, for a full-length commercial combining Datu Puti vinegar and soy sauce and telling a fictional version of how Pacquiao met his wife and became a champion.

A NutriAsia executive quoted by Yahoo! in 2011, Oscar “Ren-ren” Reyes, said the sour face “elicits so much laughter you can’t help but share and try it yourself,” and described the brand as part of Filipino pop culture. In recent years NutriAsia has promoted the Datu Puti Adobo Series of ready sauces with the pop group SB19, according to its website.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Filipino food brands: Datu Puti, Silver Swan, Mang Tomas, Lucky Me!, Rebisco, Magnolia and Century Tuna. Food brands in the Philippines in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s vision to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood sari-sari store to a supermarket shelf.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Acres & Acres, a joint venture and NutriAsia.

Datu Puti reached its present owner through a joint venture. NutriAsia’s own history says the company began around 1990–91 as Enriton Natural Foods, which had one regional brand, Nelicom. Enriton bought the Jufran and Mafran catsup brands and formed a joint venture with Acres & Acres, which the company describes as the maker of Datu Puti Vinegar, Papa banana catsup and Mang Tomas. The joint venture was named Southeast Asia Food, Inc. (SAFI). English Wikipedia says Enriton was founded on 1 October 1990 by Joselito D. Campos Jr. In 1996 SAFI bought the UFC catsup business and set up NutriAsia, Inc. as a holding company, and in 2009, Wikipedia says, SAFI was absorbed into NutriAsia.

NutriAsia, headquartered at the JY Campos Centre in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, is described by English Wikipedia as the Philippines’ leading condiment producer, and The Philippine Star called it the country’s largest condiments company in 2014. The company says it consolidated its liquid-condiment production at a large plant in Marilao, Bulacan, and at Cabuyao, Laguna, between 2006 and 2008, with lines in Cebu and Davao. The Philippine Star published a photograph of a Datu Puti production line at a Nutri-Asia factory in 2014 and reported that the Marilao and Cabuyao plants held FSSC 22000 food-safety certification.

In 2014 the news site InterAksyon reported that Datu Puti was the Philippine market leader in vinegar and led soy-sauce sales in Luzon, and that overseas sales, mainly to Filipino communities in the United States and the Middle East, were about ten percent of the company’s business. NutriAsia’s chief operating officer, Angie Go Flaminiano, told the site that its products were sold at Costco, Safeway and Walmart in the United States. Today the company lists Datu Puti vinegars, regional “Pinoy Originals” vinegars, soy sauce, Toyomixes and fish sauce, and in 2014 NutriAsia also bought Silver Swan, the older soy-sauce brand, which it now sells alongside Datu Puti.

For a design guide, Datu Puti shows how a single facial expression, repeated for four decades, can carry a brand as far as its logo. Compare Silver Swan, its stablemate, and Kikkoman. For this guide we use red, vinegar white and navy with a bold grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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