A San Pedro sardine packer that became a tuna brand.

StarKist began in 1917 in San Pedro, California, at the harbour then known as Fish Harbor, as the French Sardine Company of California. English Wikipedia, citing NOAA Fisheries and the Daily Breeze, names its founder as Martin J. Bogdanovich, a Croatian immigrant, who started the business with several partners and was known for keeping his catch on crushed ice.

The tuna came later. Tuna was first sold under the StarKist name in 1942, English Wikipedia says, and Bogdanovich’s son Joseph went on to run the company, which was renamed after its brand in 1953. Its cannery on Terminal Island, in the Port of Los Angeles, stopped canning in 1984, the Daily Breeze reported in 2021.

In 1963 the H.J. Heinz Company bought StarKist. The same year the company opened a cannery at Pago Pago in American Samoa; when the plant marked its fiftieth anniversary in August 2013, the Associated Press reported that StarKist Samoa employed nearly half of the territory’s private-sector workers. Under Heinz the business also made 9Lives, a tuna-based cat food introduced in 1959, and in 1988 Heinz moved its pet foods into a separate division, the Los Angeles Times reported; by then Joseph Bogdanovich had become a Heinz vice-chairman, English Wikipedia says.

Charlie the Tuna, since 1961.

StarKist’s best-known asset is a cartoon fish. Charlie the Tuna was created in 1961 by the copywriter Tom Rogers at the advertising agency Leo Burnett, according to English Wikipedia and Advertising Week. Charlie is drawn as a beatnik in a red beret and thick-rimmed glasses who believes his refined taste makes him the right fish for StarKist, and the brand keeps turning him down. English Wikipedia, citing the Lincoln Journal, says Rogers based the character on his friend Henry Nemo, and some spots closed with “Tell ’em Charlie sent you.” Herschel Bernardi gave him his original voice, and the announcer Danny Dark delivered the rejection: “Sorry, Charlie.” The ads explained the joke in a single line — StarKist did not want tunas with good taste, it wanted tunas that taste good.

English Wikipedia says the early commercials were animated by DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, and that Charlie returned in 1999 to promote a new line of tuna, as CNN reported at the time. He has stayed in use since. In January 2025 StarKist began a campaign titled “The First Name in Tuna,” made with its creative agency quench, in which Charlie pitches ideas to StarKist executives; the first spot, “The Perfect Catch,” played on television dating shows, Fish Focus reported in April 2025. Later spots had Charlie proposing a drone delivery service and a virtual tuna assistant, Advertising Week reported; in the new ads the executives answer that the brand already offers more than twenty flavours. Michael Merritt Jr., StarKist’s head of marketing, told the magazine that Charlie’s return would be playful and more hands-on than a typical mascot.

In July 2026 MediaPost reported that the Knoxville, Tennessee, agency Tombras had been named StarKist’s agency of record, taking over brand strategy, creative and media from several agencies, with its first work due in the autumn and featuring the brand’s long-time mascot.

American tinned seafood.

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 Korean-owned brand with a Virginia head office.

Ownership has changed twice since Heinz. In 2002 Heinz sold StarKist, together with its pet foods, to Del Monte, UPI reported, and in 2008 Del Monte sold StarKist to the South Korean group Dongwon Industries, according to English Wikipedia, citing the New York Times, and the Associated Press. Dongwon has owned StarKist since 2008. The AP still described the company as Pittsburgh-based in 2013; in June 2021 Reston Now reported that StarKist would close its Pittsburgh head office at the end of March 2022, and chief executive Andrew Choe said the company would make Reston, Virginia, its “official global headquarters starting in April 2022.”

The range now reaches well beyond the can. The company’s website lists pouches, the flavoured Tuna Creations and Chicken Creations lines, StarKist E.V.O.O. tuna in extra virgin olive oil and Smart Bowls of grains and beans with tuna, alongside classic light and albacore tuna in water and oil.

The company has faced two notable consumer cases. In August 2015 it settled a class action alleging that it had underfilled five-ounce cans, English Wikipedia says, citing Fox 4 Kansas City. The second was the canned-tuna price-fixing case. StarKist was sued in August 2015, accused of colluding with Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea to fix prices; in October 2018 it agreed to plead guilty to a felony price-fixing charge, and on 11 September 2019 Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco ordered it to pay a criminal fine, the Associated Press reported. English Wikipedia describes the fine as the statutory maximum.

For a design guide, StarKist shows how one advertising character can carry a brand for more than sixty years and through three owners. Compare Dongwon, its Korean parent, and Bumble Bee, another American tuna name. For this guide we use a beret red, harbor navy and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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