A founder’s story, then a kosher-food company.

Season is a canned-fish brand based in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and best known for its sardines. It dates itself to 1921: “Founded in 1921,” its website says, and the badge on its current logo carries the line “Premium Quality Since 1921.” Moroccan business reports of its sale in 2021, in Boursenews and Le360, gave the same year.

The company credits its start to Isaac Epstein. Its heritage page describes him as a Polish immigrant who came to the United States to make a better life for himself and his family, and who began with “a simple idea” — selling specialty fish products to grocers in the Northeast. The company tells the story as one of “The American Dream” and says it has kept “Isaac’s vision, hope, and spirit.” That founding account comes from Season itself, and it gives few other details of Epstein or of the brand’s early decades.

The documented record picks up much later, inside a kosher-food company. By 2019 Season belonged to Manischewitz, the New Jersey maker of kosher foods. just-food reported in July 2019 that Manischewitz had begun as a matzo bakery in Cincinnati in 1888, opened a second plant in Jersey City in 1932, and had been bought in 2014 by Sankaty Advisors, an arm of Bain Capital. That month the company announced that it would sell its kosher-foods business to the distributor Kenover Marketing Corp, known as Kayco — and, just-food reported, the Season brand was excluded from the deal.

The Italian news site Il Post, citing The New York Times, put it plainly in August 2019: Manischewitz had sold almost all of its products to Kayco and kept only Season, a brand known for canned sardines among shoppers who do not buy kosher food as well as those who do. Today Season’s website tells customers that it is “no longer affiliated with the Manischewitz brand” and cannot answer questions about Manischewitz products.

A Moroccan owner and a mostly Moroccan catch.

The brand left American ownership two years later. On 2 June 2021, Boursenews reported, the Moroccan group Mutandis signed an agreement with RAB Food — an American food company affiliated with a fund managed by Bain Capital Credit — to buy all of Season Brand LLC, based in New Jersey. Le360 reported on 6 September 2021 that the purchase had been completed and that Season had joined the group from 1 August 2021. Mutandis has owned Season since 2021, and the group’s results for 2025, reported by Boursenews in February 2026, still discuss the Season brand in the American market.

Mutandis is a consumer-goods group based in Casablanca. French Wikipedia says it was founded in 2008 by the financier Adil Douiri, a former Moroccan tourism minister, and has been listed on the Casablanca stock exchange since December 2018, with businesses in detergents, bottled water, fruit juices and canned seafood. Season gave it a brand already on American shelves: in 2021 Boursenews described Season as sold through major American supermarket chains and warehouse clubs, naming Costco and Walmart.

Season does not can its own fish. Boursenews reported in 2021 that the brand did not produce canned fish itself but bought from several countries, Morocco above all. The company’s own pages match that picture for its best-known lines: Season says its skinless and boneless sardines are “wild caught in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco,” and its blog says the same of its mackerel.

Other lines come from further afield, by the company’s account. Its yellowfin tuna fillets, Season says, are wild-caught off the coast of Costa Rica and hand-packed into glass jars. Its Caviart black seaweed pearls, a plant-based alternative to caviar created by the Danish chef Jens Moller, are described as sourced in France and made in Denmark. Its range also takes in anchovies and kippers and, most recently, an organic extra virgin olive oil from Morocco.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all American names in tinned seafood: StarKist, Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, Safe Catch, American Tuna, Crown Prince and Season. Tinned-fish brands sit at many different points in the trade, from long-established household names on supermarket shelves to smaller companies built around a single fishery or a single product.

Several of the best-known American names now belong to groups based outside the United States. English Wikipedia records that South Korea’s Dongwon Industries bought StarKist from Del Monte Foods in 2008, that Taiwan’s FCF acquired Bumble Bee in 2020, and that Thailand’s Thai Union became the sole owner of Chicken of the Sea in 2000; Moroccan reports in 2021 recorded the purchase of Season by the Casablanca group Mutandis. A tinned-fish brand’s identity is therefore often carried less by a single factory than by a label, a name and a mascot, because the company behind the name may have changed hands and its fish may be caught and packed far from where the brand began.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fish is caught and canned. 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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A badge, a ribbon and “Since 1921.”

Season’s current look dates from 2024. WholeFoods Magazine reported in June 2024 that Season was introducing tuna fillets and rolling out a brand redesign with an updated logo and new packaging, meant to celebrate the company’s heritage and, in the company’s words, to capture its commitment to quality, sustainability and company values.

The logo on Season’s website is a circular badge built around a portrait: a smiling woman with windswept hair and a red neckerchief, with the sea and a lighthouse behind her. The words “Premium Quality Since 1921” run around the top of the circle, and the name SEASON sits in white capitals on a broad brown ribbon across its base. It is the language of the heritage food label — a face, a date and a banner — rather than a modern wordmark, and it places the founding year inside the mark itself.

The packaging also carries the brand’s claims. Season says its products are wild caught, and lists certification by Friend of the Sea, the international non-profit that certifies seafood from sustainable fisheries, along with Non-GMO Project verification and gluten-free certification. It also says it asks its suppliers for cans without BPA in the lining. These are the company’s own statements; the certifying bodies keep their own registers.

Season’s name, finally, sits beside a family of much larger tinned-fish brands in the United States, several of which, like Season, now belong to groups based abroad. Its story differs from theirs in scale and in history: a sardine brand that began, by its own account, with one immigrant trader, passed through a kosher-food company, and now answers to an owner in Casablanca whose home country supplies much of its fish.

For a design guide, Season shows how a brand can put its founding date and a human face at the centre of its mark. Compare King Oscar, another sardine brand built on a portrait and a name, and Wild Planet, an American tinned-fish brand that has also changed hands. For this guide we use a ribbon brown, an Atlantic blue and a red with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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