A Japanese word, a New Jersey importer and a shelf of Asian ingredients.

Ka-Me is an American brand of Asian cooking ingredients and snacks: noodles, sauces and condiments, cooking oils and vinegars, rice crackers, coconut milk and canned vegetables. Its website, checked in October 2026, calls it the home cook’s “Key to Asian Made Easy” and credits its copyright to PANOS brands, a specialty-food company that New Hope Network, reporting on 3 February 2016, said was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Rochelle Park, New Jersey.

The name comes from Japanese. The company says KA-ME means turtle in Japanese and that, in Japan, the turtle is a symbol of longevity. An archived copy of the brand’s About page from February 2013, captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, adds that in China the turtle represents heaven and earth as well as long life, and says the company uses the animal as a symbol of its own longevity as a brand. On its website the name is usually written in capitals with a hyphen, as KA-ME.

The earliest copy of the brand’s website in the Wayback Machine dates from November 2001. Its home page says the products were “Imported and Distributed by Liberty Richter”, and its About page says KA-ME was exclusively imported and distributed by Liberty Richter, a company the page says was established in 1926.

The same 2001 page sets out the corporate chain above that importer. It says Liberty Richter had been a division of Tree of Life, Inc. since 1999, and that Tree of Life’s parent company was the Dutch food group Wessanen, based in the Netherlands. The page presents KA-ME as a range of Asian food products and cooking ingredients for home cooks, sold in supermarkets and finer food stores.

Wessanen was also the seller in the next change of ownership recorded for the brand, when it sold the American company that by then held KA-ME.

From a Wessanen subsidiary to private equity, twice.

By 2010 the brand sat inside another Wessanen business in the United States. On 20 December 2010 the private-equity firm High Road Capital Partners announced that it had completed the purchase of New Jersey-based PANOS brands, LLC, which its release described as a subsidiary of Royal Wessanen nv. The release said the transaction closed on 17 December 2010 and listed KA-ME Asian foods in the PANOS portfolio alongside Sesmark crackers, MI-DEL cookies and Amore food pastes.

FoodIngredientsFirst reported the same sale on 20 December 2010. It described PANOS as the manager of a portfolio of natural and specialty food and beverage brands, KA-ME among them, sold in the United States and Canada, and said the divestment was in line with Wessanen’s strategy of concentrating on organic food in Europe.

The archived KA-ME About page from February 2013 records the new arrangement in a single line: the brand, it says, “is part of PANOS brands, with headquarters in the United States.”

PANOS changed hands again in 2016. New Hope Network, publishing an announcement from the investment bank Harris Williams & Co. on 3 February 2016, reported the sale of PANOS Brands, LLC, then a portfolio company of High Road Capital Partners, to the private-equity firm Hammond, Kennedy, Whitney & Company. The announcement listed KA-ME among the PANOS brands, together with MI-DEL, Sesmark and Chatfield’s, and placed the company in the specialty, natural, organic and mass grocery channels.

On where its products are made, the company speaks for itself. Its FAQ says KA-ME offers products from many Asian cuisines and so manufactures in many countries throughout Asia and some in the United States; it says each product made outside the United States is marked with its country of origin, and names China, Thailand and Taiwan among the countries it currently sources from. The current website, checked in October 2026, carries a © 2024 PANOS brands line and links to PANOS from its footer.

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.

From “Eat Authentic. Think Easy.” to the “Key to Asian Made Easy”.

The KA-ME identity rests on two ideas the company states in its own words: a Japanese name that means turtle, and a promise that Asian cooking can be made easy. In February 2013, the archived website shows, the brand’s tagline was “Eat Authentic. Think Easy.” By October 2026 the home page called KA-ME the “Key to Asian Made Easy”, a phrase whose initial letters spell out the brand name.

The 2013 About page set out the same balance at greater length. It said the company aimed to stay true to the flavours and ingredients of Asian cuisine while making them easy to enjoy for people with busy lifestyles, that it worked with Asian food experts in the United States and in Asia, and that it made “one important concession to modernity: convenience”, from snacks eaten straight from the packet to meals heated in a microwave in minutes.

The turtle story has stayed almost word for word across the years. The current About Us page repeats the explanation found in 2013 — longevity in Japan, heaven and earth in China, the turtle as a symbol of the brand’s own longevity — and the current home page says the range covers cuisines from China, Japan and Korea to Thailand, Vietnam and beyond.

The range itself is broad. The 2026 website groups it into noodles, sauces and condiments, cooking oils, vinegars and wine, rice crackers, coconut milk and canned vegetables, and its recipe pages include a chili ponzu sauce, a chili lemongrass sauce and a Korean barbecue made with gochujang.

For a design guide, Ka-Me shows how a short foreign word with an animal and a meaning attached can carry a grocery brand through several changes of owner. Compare it with Kikkoman, whose guide covers a tortoise-shell hexagon, and with Annie Chun’s, another American brand of Asian-style noodles and sauces. For this guide we use turtle green, chili red and sesame gold on rice cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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