A fish-sauce house in old Bangkok.

Squid Brand is the fish sauce of Thai Fishsauce Factory (Squid Brand) Co., Ltd., a Bangkok company whose head office is in Talat Noi, the old riverside trading quarter on the Chao Phraya that English Wikipedia describes as a historic settlement of Chinese merchant communities. In Thai the brand is ตราปลาหมึก, “squid brand.” The company says it was founded in 1944 by Tien Nithipitigan, and describes itself as a pioneer of authentic Thai fish sauce with more than 80 years behind it.

The company’s account of its sauce begins with the raw materials. It says it selects fresh anchovies and sea salt and leaves them to ferment naturally for 18 months, keeping to traditional methods while bringing in modern machinery. On its product questions page it lists the ingredients of its fish sauce as anchovy, sea salt and sugar, and says that good fish sauce should be reddish-brown, clear and free of sediment, with the natural smell and taste of fish sauce. Salt, the company says, preserves the sauce by itself, so it adds no preservatives, and it says it adds no MSG or other flavour enhancers.

The same page explains changes a cook may notice in the bottle. The company says its sauce can darken after opening because its protein reacts with oxygen, light and changes of temperature, through oxidation and the Maillard reaction; that clouds of protein can form when the temperature changes; and that clear crystals at the bottom are sea salt coming out of solution when the temperature drops. None of these, it says, affects the quality of the sauce, and it gives a best-before period of 12 to 24 months depending on the container.

Two provinces, a green label and a family of bottles.

Production has long since outgrown the old quarter. The company names facilities in Samut Prakan and Samut Songkhram, the provinces south-east and south-west of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand, and puts their production capacity at more than one million cartons a year. It says it employs around 300 experts and specialists, has registered capital of 140 million baht, holds ISO 9001:2015 certification from TÜV NORD and follows HACCP food-safety principles.

The range is built around a few labels. For export, the company lists an Original Green Label fish sauce and a Gold Label premium fish sauce, along with a fish sauce made with Himalayan salt, a vegan fish sauce and two milder fish sauces, one for children and one for older adults, which it calls “silver ages.” In Thailand it sells a green squid, a yellow squid and a gold squid, and a premium line it calls The Royal Squid Brand Premium Fish Sauce. The company also mentions a truffle fish sauce among its newer products.

Exports are the core of how the company presents itself. It calls itself Thailand’s No.1 fish-sauce exporter and says it sells in more than 70 countries across the Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. Its English website describes the sauce as trusted by chefs, home cooks and food lovers, and its partners pages are split between export and domestic distributors.

The brand’s values are set out as an acronym on its own name. Under the heading “S-Q-U-I-D,” the company lists Superior Quality, Quest for Innovation, Unwavering Authenticity, International Excellence and Dedication to Sustainability, and it pairs them with the line “Authentic Taste, Global Trust.” Its stated vision is to become the world’s leading fish-sauce brand, and its mission, in its own words, is “crafting premium Thai fish sauce that elevates global cuisines while preserving our cultural heritage and pioneering innovation.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make sauces, snacks or pantry staples, and all of them come from Thailand: Mae Ploy, Tao Kae Noi, Healthy Boy, Squid Brand, Golden Mountain, Lobo and Chaokoh. Thai food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a fresh market to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the dish or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory 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 packed.

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.

Online since the 2000s, still in Talat Noi.

Squid Brand has been on the web for two decades. An archived copy of squidbrand.com from June 2013 shows a bilingual Thai and English entry page headed “Your Cooking Center,” carrying a 2006 copyright line for Thai Fishsauce Factory (Squid Brand) Co., Ltd. and the same Talat Noi address the company uses today, with a credit to the web firm Qmaker. The current site, with its copyright line of 2022, is built in Thai and English, with recipes, media, a product catalogue split into export and domestic ranges, and a downloadable company profile.

The company’s address has not moved. Its head office is still listed at Trok Rong Nam Khaeng, a lane in Talat Noi, while the fermentation and bottling happen at the plants in Samut Prakan and Samut Songkhram, the company says. It presents the brand on social media as Squid Brand ตราปลาหมึก, keeping the Thai name beside the English one.

For a design guide, Squid Brand shows how a single animal name and a few coloured labels can carry one Bangkok fish-sauce house from 1944 into more than 70 export markets. Compare Healthy Boy, the Bangkok soy-sauce maker of 1947, and Golden Mountain, the Thai seasoning sauce. For this guide we use an ink navy, a label green and an amber with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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