Two Michigan graduates, a basement crop of sprouts and a jar.

La Choy is an American brand of Asian-style sauces, vegetables, crispy noodles, meals and fortune cookies, owned by Conagra Brands. Its story begins in Detroit, Michigan. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1922 by Ilhan New and Wallace J. “Wally” Smith, who had met at the University of Michigan, and that the business began with canned mung bean sprouts sold in Smith’s Detroit grocery store.

Historic Detroit, the city architectural-history site written by Amy Elliott Bragg and Dan Austin, fills in the background. It says New was born in Pyongyang and moved to Nebraska as a child in 1904, before studying at Michigan; Smith, a native of Evart in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, ran a corner grocery in Detroit and wanted to meet his restaurant customers’ demand for mung bean sprouts, an ingredient in chop suey. New grew a trial crop of sprouts in bathtubs in his basement, and because fresh sprouts kept poorly, the partners preserved them and sold them in glass jars. Their company, La Choy Food Products Inc., was incorporated in Detroit in 1922, the site says.

The range soon widened. Historic Detroit lists chow mein noodles, sauces and preserved specialty vegetables, and says the company offered fermented soy sauce imported from China as early as the 1920s, later adding a soy sauce of its own in the 1960s. English Wikipedia’s list for the late 1930s runs from bean sprouts and soy sauce to water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, kumquats and chow mein noodles. The company also printed recipe pamphlets to encourage American home cooks to try Chinese-style dishes, Historic Detroit says, including a cookbook called The Art and Secrets of Chinese Cookery.

The two founders’ paths soon divided. Historic Detroit says New returned to Korea in 1926, founded the pharmaceutical company Yuhan and sold his La Choy shares around 1930. English Wikipedia, which describes New as a Korean independence activist as well as an entrepreneur, gives 1930 as the year he left La Choy.

A streamlined factory, a wartime move and a dragon on television.

In 1937 La Choy built a new office and factory on Schoolcraft Road in Detroit, having previously worked from the Detroit Harbor Terminal building and a warehouse on West Jefferson Avenue. Historic Detroit, quoting The Detroit News of 13 June 1937, says the Detroit architects Giffels & Vallet gave the two-storey building “a streamline design” meant to “provide maximum light for all the factory and office rooms.” Ground was broken in late June 1937 and the plant was formally opened in January 1938, the site says.

The war moved the company. Historic Detroit says production was halted in 1942 by restrictions on tin for cans and by difficulties importing goods, and, citing The Detroit News of 19 June 1942, that La Choy moved its operations to Archbold, Ohio; the Schoolcraft plant was bought by the federal government’s Defense Plant Corporation for war production. English Wikipedia also dates the move to Archbold to 1942.

Ownership followed. Historic Detroit says the Beatrice Creamery Co. of Chicago acquired La Choy on 28 September 1943, after its Detroit district manager, George A. Gardella, took an interest in the business. English Wikipedia, citing Barron’s of 4 October 1943, also gives 1943.

Under Beatrice, La Choy’s advertising found a puppeteer. Jim Henson’s Red Book, the log of his work published online by The Jim Henson Company, records under 25 October 1966: “Shoot big La Choy Dragon in Washington.” The company archivist’s note says Henson was hired in 1965 by the Campbell-Mithun advertising agency on behalf of Beatrice Foods to make commercials featuring Delbert the La Choy Dragon, whose flames, blown across cans of La Choy Chow Mein at Rodel Studios in Washington, illustrated the slogan “Quick cooked in dragon fire.” In 1966, the note says, Henson redesigned the puppet as a full-body character; he kept the voice and put the young performer Frank Oz inside. The archive dates Henson’s final La Choy spots, built around characters called the Sad Bride and the Wifeless Husband, to October 1967.

English Wikipedia also records a 1970s jingle built on the line “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American.”

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.

A pantry name that has belonged to Conagra since 1990.

Beatrice was itself taken over in the 1980s. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, tracing the history in January 2002, said the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts owned Beatrice and its Hunt-Wesson unit, which made La Choy, and in 1990 sold Beatrice to ConAgra. The Chicago Tribune, reporting in June 1989, described La Choy as owned by the Chicago-based Beatrice Co. Conagra’s own La Choy timeline also gives 1990 as the year the brand “joins the Conagra family,” and English Wikipedia says the brand has been a ConAgra property since.

The purchase brought a rival under the same roof. In 1995 Hunt-Wesson bought the name and trademark of Chun King, the Minnesota-born chow mein brand, from its Singapore owner, the Baltimore Sun reported on 4 April 1995, and the Star Tribune reported in 2002 that ConAgra had since largely folded Chun King while continuing to make La Choy.

Today the La Choy website, carrying a Conagra Brands copyright, presents “Asian-Style Foods Made Simple” and uses the line “Quality Flavors Since 1922.” It groups the range into sauces, vegetables, meals, crispy noodles and fortune cookies. The company’s heritage timeline lists canned bean sprouts in 1937, soy sauces in 1965, chicken and beef chow mein meal starters in 1990 and frozen tempura chicken entrées, including orange chicken and General Tso’s chicken, in 2023, and says the brand serves its food “across North America.”

For a design guide, La Choy shows how a pantry brand can carry its founding story, from a Detroit corner grocery and a basement crop of sprouts, through a century of owners, and how an advertising character such as Henson’s dragon becomes part of a brand’s documented record. Compare Chef Boyardee, another Conagra pantry name built on a founder’s story, and Hunt’s, the tomato brand whose Hunt-Wesson business once owned La Choy. For this guide we use lacquer red, soy brown and sprout cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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