A soldier’s advice, a packet of seeds and a sauce.

Kagome traces itself to 1899, when Ichitaro Kanie began growing Western vegetables in Aichi Prefecture and, as the company puts it, saw his first tomato sprout. Japanese Wikipedia says that while Kanie was serving in the army a superior officer advised him that if he went into farming he should grow Western vegetables, and that he received his tomato seeds from Sugiemon Sato of the agricultural experiment station in Aichi.

After repeated failures he succeeded in making a domestic tomato sauce in 1903, and in 1906 he completed a factory in what is now the city of Tokai, south of Nagoya, to make it at scale, Japanese Wikipedia says. In 1908, the company says, he began making tomato ketchup and Worcester sauce. Tomato juice followed much later, in 1933.

The business took several names before it took its brand’s. Japanese Wikipedia lists Aichi Tomato Sauce Manufacturing, a partnership, from 1914; Aichi Tomato Manufacturing, a joint-stock company, from 1923; and Aichi Tomato, formed in 1949 by a merger of five companies. On 1 April 1963 the company renamed itself Kagome, after the trademark its products already carried. It listed on the Nagoya stock exchange in 1976 and on the first sections of the Tokyo and Nagoya exchanges in 1978, the company says. Today Kagome keeps two head offices: its registered office in Nagoya and a management office in Tokyo.

A star refused, a basket weave accepted.

The name Kagome comes from the mark, and the mark comes from a compromise. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a 2013 book on corporate names, says Kanie first wanted a five-pointed star as his trademark, out of gratitude to the army, but the design was refused for its military associations. He then put two triangles together into a six-pointed star and presented it as kagome, the open hexagonal weave of the bamboo baskets used at harvest, and this version was accepted. The company dates the registration of the Kagome trademark to 1917.

When the company took the Kagome name in 1963 it also adopted a tomato mark, which Japanese Wikipedia describes as combining a tomato with the basket-weave star. In 1983 the mark changed again, to the word KAGOME, dropping both the weave and the tomato, and the company adopted the line “Shizen o, oishiku, tanoshiku. KAGOME,” which it translates as bringing nature, deliciousness and fun. That line became its formal brand statement in 2003.

The current logo dates from 1 April 2003, when a tomato returned to the mark. Japanese Wikipedia gives a meaning for each of its three colours: yellow for light and fruit, green for nature, vegetables and freshness, and red for the sun, the tomato and energy. No official colour values are published with that description.

The products moved with the times. In 1966, the company says, Kagome released what it calls the world’s first ketchup in a plastic tube. Vegetable juice arrived in 1973, and in 1995 the company launched Yasai Seikatsu 100, a vegetable-and-fruit juice line. In 2002 it bought the lactic-acid drinks business of Yukijirushi, which became Kagome Labio before being absorbed in 2009, Japanese Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make condiments and seasonings, and all of them come from Japan: Mizkan, Ajinomoto, S&B, Kagome, Otafuku, Bull-Dog and Yamasa. Japanese condiment and seasoning brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to companies that have grown into much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood shop to a restaurant kitchen.

A condiment brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the dish it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town 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 bottled.

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.

Factories at home, tomatoes abroad.

Kagome grew from one Aichi factory into a network of plants. Japanese Wikipedia lists factories opened at Nasu, in Tochigi Prefecture, in 1961, in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1962 and at Fujimi, in Nagano Prefecture, in 1968. Abroad, the company set up Taiwan Kagome in 1967, a subsidiary in the United States in 1988 and a processing plant in California in 1990, the company says; English Wikipedia, citing a 2008 company profile, gives the American subsidiary’s date as 1998.

Since then the company has bought into tomato growing and processing itself. Its history records an expansion into tomato processing in Portugal in 2007, the acquisition of an Australian tomato company in 2010, control of the American seed developer United Genetics in 2013 and, in 2024, the takeover of the Californian tomato processor Ingomar Packing Company as a consolidated subsidiary. Its overseas group also includes Vegitalia in Italy, which makes Mediterranean vegetable concentrates mainly for Kagome in Japan, Kagome Foods India, which supplies pizza sauce to restaurant chains, and Kagome Australia, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia adds the 2015 purchase of Preferred Brands International in the United States.

At home, Kagome formed a business and capital tie-up with Asahi Breweries in 2007, the company says. Its shares remain listed in Tokyo and Nagoya. The company describes its American, Portuguese and Australian businesses as tomato processors, making products such as tomato paste.

For a design guide, Kagome shows how a refused star became a basket weave, then a word, then a tomato, while the company name followed the trademark rather than the other way round. Compare Mutti, the Parma tomato maker, and Kikkoman, another Japanese seasoning company. For this guide we use a tomato red, a vine green and a sun yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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