This is actually my third blog post about a product from Ghana. (The others were about a Ghanaian candy on April 13, 2016, and a Ghanaian soft drink on October 13, 2018.) It's another So It Is African Market find. And while the company which owns and distributes this tuna is American, the fish itself is a product of that African nation.
The company which produced this canned tuna was Pioneer Food Cannery, Ltd., which to add to the cosmopolitan nature appears to be Thai. However, I wasn't able to find out much of anything about this firm online. So, therefore, I'll focus on what I could learn, which was about the overall parent company, StarKist. StarKist was created in San Pedro, California, in 1917 by a Croatian immigrant named Martin J. Bogdanovich and some unnamed partners. Originally the company's name was the French Sardine Company. By 1942 the company marketed under the StarKist name, though, and by 1953 the company title formally switched to StarKist. StarKist has been bought out by other businesses several times over the years. Heinz acquired them in 1963, and then Del Monte did so in 2002. And, finally, in either 2006 or 2008 (sources differ), Dongwon Industries of Korea became the owner.
I'm sad to report that StarKist has some skeletons in the closet. A class action lawsuit was filed in 2015 claiming that the company had deliberately under filled 5 ounce cans of tuna. By September of 2019 a settlement was reached, and consumers received coupons or small payouts. More dramatically, StarKist, along with its giant competitors Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee, were guilty of felony price fixing. Chicken of the Sea cooperated early with prosecutors, so they got off with no fine. But Bumble Bee had to pay a fine of $25,000,000, and StarKist $100,000,000. Reportedly Bumble Bee's fine was lower because it was thought that the company would have gone bankrupt if it was forced to pay the larger fine.
Anyway, here's what I thought about the food itself:
1) StarKist tuna flakes, in sunflower oil: Came in a 170 gram can. Eaten plain it tasted like regular canned tuna. Otherwise I had it mixed with mayo as a sandwich on 10 grain bread. And it tasted like regular tuna once again, only oilier. (I usually have tuna packed in water.) I didn't detect a difference in the "flakes" rather than the usual shredded chunks of tuna. So overall I thought StarKist tuna flakes were okay, and made for a solid tuna sandwich. I prefer the tuna packed in water, but this was alright. And to be fair I've never noticed much of a difference in canned tuna brands--they all pretty much taste the same. Fresh is better, but canned is acceptable.
Finally, when the average person hears "StarKist," they probably think of the company's corporate mascot--a cartoon anthropomorphic tuna fish named Charlie. Charlie was created by Tom Rogers of the Leo Burnett ad agency back in 1961. (I read that "Vampira" portrayer Maila Nurmi claimed that actor James Dean drew a prototype of Charlie on a napkin at a coffee shop in Hollywood before his official birth, but this appears to be a weird myth.) Burnett's agency also produced the Pillsbury Doughboy character, the lonely Maytag repairman, and the Jolly Green Giant and Sprout mascots. Anyway, Charlie the Tuna was voiced by a television and Broadway actor Herschel Bernardi (until his death in 1986), and the signature tagline of the advertisement was a narrator telling the character "Sorry Charlie." Going further into this character's minutia, I learned that the bachelor Charlie actually had a love interest for a short time in 1991, with the "Premia" character, who was used to promote StarKist's Chunk Light Tuna brand. Also, the tiny town of Charleston, Oregon has had a Charlie the Tuna statue since 1968. Unfortunately some rowdy teens stole and burnt the statue in 2008, but the townspeople pooled their resources and a replacement statue was quickly erected.
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