A Shizuoka tea company with a Tokyo name.

Ito En began in 1966 in the city of Shizuoka as Frontier Tea Co. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the company’s securities reports and a 2012 book on the company, says it was founded by two brothers, Masanori Honjo and Hachiro Honjo, and set up jointly by Masanori Honjo’s door-to-door household-goods firm, Nihon Family Service, and a Shizuoka tea exporter. The company gives its date of establishment as August 1966.

The name came later. Japanese Wikipedia says the company acquired the “Ito En” shop name from Kamayoshi, a tea wholesaler in Tokyo’s Ueno district, and in May 1969 it became Ito En, Ltd. That year it moved its registered head office to Tokyo, where it has been based since; it is now in Honmachi, Shibuya.

Its early business was packaged leaf tea. The company says it introduced a Swiss high-speed packing machine and vacuum packing in 1972, and that it has led Japan’s market for household tea-leaf products since 1968, with packaged tea developed as an alternative to tea sold by weight. In 1974 it built a factory at Sagara, now part of Makinohara in Shizuoka, and in 1979 it signed an agreement with a Chinese state trading company to import oolong tea, which it describes as a first for Japan. Canned oolong followed in 1980–81, and in 1981, the company says, it began selling black tea imported directly from Sri Lanka.

A can of green tea, then a bottle.

The product that made Ito En a household name was a cold drink. The company says it began work on a portable canned tea in 1975 and, after 67,200 prototypes, developed a canned green tea in 1984 using a process that removes oxygen from the can; it went on sale in February 1985 as Kan-iri Sencha, “canned sencha.” The company calls it the world’s first green tea beverage. In 1986 the canned green tea received the Nikkei newspaper group’s annual excellent-product award, Japanese Wikipedia says.

In February 1989 the drink was renamed Oi Ocha — roughly, “Hey, tea!” Japanese Wikipedia says the new name was proposed by Yasuhiko Shimazaki, head of the advertising firm Shima Creative House, and came from a 1970s Ito En television commercial in which the actor Shogo Shimada calls out “Oi, ocha”; the company’s customer FAQ gives the commercial as the source. The same year Ito En launched the Oi Ocha New Haiku Contest, and winning haiku are printed on the drink’s labels.

In 1990, Japanese Wikipedia says, Oi Ocha became the first green tea sold in a PET bottle — 1.5 litres, at first tinted green and later made clear to ease recycling; the company dates its 500 ml PET bottle to 1996. When Suntory launched its rival Iyemon in 2004, a proposal to give the pack a more formal typeface was turned down and the brush lettering kept, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Oi Ocha won Japan’s Good Design Long Life Design Award in 2011, and in October 2015 its spoken “Oi Ocha” call was among the first sound trademarks accepted by the Japan Patent Office. The company says Guinness World Records has certified Oi Ocha as the largest ready-to-drink green tea brand by retail sales, most recently for 2023.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell tea, and their names were founded in five countries: Lipton and Brooke Bond in Britain, Tata Tea and Wagh Bakri in India, Ito En in Japan, Basilur in Sri Lanka, and Salada in Canada. Where a tea brand was founded is only the start of its story, because a name can travel a long way from the city where it began, and the country on its founding record need not be the country where its owner sits today.

A tea brand’s identity is usually carried less by a field than by a blend, a packet and the cup it promises, because the leaf inside may have been grown far from the place where the name on the front was made. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, where its leaves are bought, and where its tea is actually blended 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 tea comes from and where it is packed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brush logo and a Tokyo listing.

Ito En is a listed company. It registered its shares over the counter in 1992, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1996, moved to its First Section in 1998 and has been on the Prime Market since 2022, according to the company and Japanese Wikipedia. The Honjo family still leads it: the president is Daisuke Honjo, the founder’s eldest son, Japanese Wikipedia says. For the year to April 2025 the company reported consolidated net sales of about 473 billion yen and 7,916 employees including overseas affiliates.

Where the drinks are made is split. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the 2012 book, describes Ito En as largely fabless at the final beverage stage, contracting production to about 40 partner factories across Japan and spreading production and logistics across five regional blocks. The company lists its own factories in Shizuoka, Hyogo, Fukushima and Okinawa and says it processes raw ingredients at its plants in Japan. Since 2001 it has run a tea-producing region development project with farmers, beginning at Miyakonojo in Miyazaki, and it says it accounts for about a quarter of Japan’s crude tea transactions.

Abroad, the company set up ITO EN (USA) in Hawaii in 1987 and ITO EN (North America) on the US mainland in 2001. The North American company holds the trademark for Teas’ Tea, a brand Ito En brought to Japan as a black-tea line in 2009. In 2006 Ito En took control of Tully’s Coffee Japan and bought the Florida supplements firm Mason Distributors. The company says Oi Ocha is sold in more than 45 countries.

Japanese Wikipedia also records how the marks are split: until about 2009 all products carried a brush-written kanji “Ito En” logo; since about 2010 the brush logo has been used mainly on Japanese teas, and a romaji “ITO EN” logotype on black tea, coffee and soft drinks.

For a design guide, Ito En shows how calligraphy and a plain wordmark can work side by side within one company. Compare Lipton, another tea name built on ready-to-drink as well as leaf tea, and Harney & Sons. For this guide we use a tea green, a deep ink and a warm paper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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