Tuna in oil, from 1931.

Hagoromo Foods began on 25 May 1931 as the Goto Kanzumesho, the Goto cannery, and started by canning tuna in oil, according to the company’s history. Japanese Wikipedia names the founder as Goto Isokichi and notes that the company’s second president bore the same name. Until 2018 its head office stood at Shimizu, the port on Suruga Bay that is now part of Shizuoka city. The business was incorporated in 1947 as Shimizuya, renamed Goto Bussan Kanzume in 1948 and Goto Kanzume in 1950.

Tuna in oil was then a new product in Japan. The company says Japanese production began in 1929, when the product was called “maguro abura-zuke kanzume” and was mostly exported to the United States. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the NTT Communications magazine COMZINE, credits the first success to an engineer at Shizuoka prefecture’s fisheries experimental station and says the Goto cannery began making it in 1931; after the Second World War, the same account says, the company turned from export to the home market. In October 1957 the Emperor Showa and the Empress visited the head office and the Shimizu plant, the company’s history records.

The present name came in two steps. In July 1969 the firm became Hagoromo Kanzume, and in December 1987, with the introduction of a corporate identity, Hagoromo Foods. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a company release, says the name comes from the legend of the hagoromo, the feathered robe of a celestial maiden, told at Miho no Matsubara, the pine-lined shore at Shimizu, and that the robe was adopted for the company name and trademark as a symbol of peace and prosperity.

The chicken of the sea.

The company’s signature is Sea Chicken, its canned tuna, whose trademark it registered in November 1958. Hagoromo says it chose the name when it began selling tuna in Japan, because steamed albacore resembled chicken in taste and texture — “the chicken of the sea” — and that giving a canned product a name of its own was then very unusual, reportedly a first. The name remains a registered trademark that only Hagoromo may use, the company says, although Japanese Wikipedia notes that people in Japan often use it for canned tuna in general.

The Asahi Shimbun, in an obituary of August 2011, called Goto Isokichi, the company’s second president and former chairman, the “father” of Sea Chicken, and noted that he had chaired the Japan Canners Association. His son Goto Yasuo is chairman, and Yasuo’s daughter Goto Saeko became president in 2019, the first woman in the post, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.

Sea Chicken has been advertised on television since June 1967, when commercials began in the Nagoya area, according to the company. Japanese Wikipedia lists the actress Yukiyo Toake as its face for more than a decade from the early years, followed by figures including Yasuko Sawaguchi and the cartoon character Chibi Maruko-chan, and, since November 2014, the actress Aoi Miyazaki. The company’s release for that 2014 campaign introduced a computer-generated version of its sound logo; Japanese Wikipedia says that from 1987 to around 2004 its commercials closed on a filmed milk-crown splash against a blue background, with the white lettering of the company name flying towards the viewer.

The same encyclopedia says the “Hagoromo” logotype on the company’s products was changed from block letters to the present rounded lettering towards the end of the Hagoromo Kanzume years. The company describes Sea Chicken as made from four fish: albacore, yellowfin, skipjack and, in a newer line, yellowtail.

Japan’s food and drink makers.

The seven brands in this group are all food and coffee names from Japan: Marukome, Hagoromo, Nagatanien, Sapporo Ichiban, UCC, Boss and Georgia. Japanese food and coffee brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal, snack or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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.

A Shizuoka company, and a name to keep apart.

Hagoromo Foods joined the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in February 2000 and is now listed on its Standard market. It moved its head office to Suruga-ku in Shizuoka in 2018, and the old Shimizu head office became the Hagoromo Innovation Center for product research and development. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the company’s 2016 figures, names an education foundation chaired by Goto Yasuo as its largest shareholder.

Beyond tuna, it has made macaroni and spaghetti since 1962, and Japanese Wikipedia lists the Popolo pasta, Shakitto Corn sweetcorn, packaged rice and pet food among its products. Its 2005 purchase of the Nagoya seafood processor Maruai, merged into the company in 2017, brought dried goods such as bonito flakes and furikake. The company lists its plants as Yaizu and Sunrise, both in Yaizu, New Shimizu and the Mount Fuji Pasta Plant in Shizuoka prefecture, and Kisosaki in Mie prefecture; a company environmental report says the New Shimizu plant began making 70-gram Sea Chicken cans in October 2020. In 2022 the Shizuoka District Court ordered a subcontractor that had made a Sea Chicken can found in 2016 to contain an insect to pay damages to Hagoromo, the Sankei Shimbun reported; the two sides later settled.

The name needs care. Hagoromo Bungu, the chalk maker of Kasugai in Aichi prefecture, is a separate company written with different characters; it closed in 2015, and its Fulltouch chalk is now made under the Hagoromo name by South Korea’s Sejong Mall, Kyodo News reported in 2019. The tuna company’s website is hagoromofoods.co.jp.

For a design guide, Hagoromo shows how a product name can become the everyday word for a whole category. Compare Century Tuna, the Philippine canned-tuna brand, and John West, the canned-fish name with roots in Oregon and Liverpool. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, can silver and a sunrise red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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