The Company Is Younger Than the Can
StarKist has been a name on American tuna since 1940. The corporation that pleaded guilty to fixing its price was formed in Delaware in 2008, and the first name on the board's consent to that plea was Mr. Jaechul Kim.
이 글의 한국어판 → 스타키스트의 유죄 인정, 이사회 동의서 첫 이름은 Mr. Jaechul Kim
Six names under one resolution
The document is dated October 1, 2018, and its title runs across the page in capitals: UNANIMOUS WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF STARKIST CO. It begins the way such papers begin. "The undersigned Directors, constituting the entire Board of Directors…" A few clauses on, it states the cost of what they are agreeing to, first in words and then in figures: a fine "in an amount of at least Fifty Million ($50,000,000.00), but not to exceed a statutory maximum, One Hundred Million Dollars."
Then the signature block. Mr. Jaechul Kim. Mr. Ingu Park. Mr. Moonsu Park. Mr. Namjung Kim. Mr. Jung Ki Ro. Mr. Andrew Choe.
The first name belongs to the founder of Dongwon Industries, which began in April 1969 as a Korean company built, in StarKist's own description, "to explore the oceans." The fourth belongs to his son, Kim Nam-jung, then vice chairman and now chairman of the group. The second, Ingu Park, had spoken for the buyer ten years earlier, when Dongwon bought StarKist. What the six men were approving was a plea agreement, filed six weeks later, on November 14, 2018, in federal court in San Francisco, in which StarKist would admit to a conspiracy to fix the price of canned tuna sold in the United States.
The plea agreement opens by identifying the defendant. "The United States of America and StarKist Co. ("defendant"), a corporation organized and existing under the laws of Delaware…"
That clause holds the first surprise in this story. According to the federal trademark register, the name STARKIST was first used on canned tuna on April 30, 1940. Charlie the Tuna made his debut in 1961. The corporation named as the defendant was formed on June 19, 2008. On the day its board signed, it was ten years and three months old.
The company is younger than the can.
Keep that sentence in mind. It sounds like a riddle. It is a legal description, and it explains how a brand born on a Los Angeles wharf came to answer, through a corporation owned from Seoul, to an American judge.
One thing has to be said at once, because the document invites a misreading. Signing a board consent to plead guilty is not the same as taking part in what was pleaded to. None of the six men on that list was charged with anything. The one StarKist executive who was charged, a former senior vice president of sales named Stephen Hodge, is not on it. What the list records is narrower and, for this magazine's purposes, more revealing. It is the point at which a foreign owner stopped being a percentage in an annual report and became six names on a federal court filing.
Six questions
This magazine asks six questions of everything on an American shelf. Where was it born. Where is it incorporated. Where is the head office. Who owns the shares. Where is it made. Who signs the paycheck. When the answers cluster, there is no story. When they scatter, the distance between them is the story.
Born: Fish Harbor, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1917. Martin J. Bogdanovich, born on the island of Vis in the Adriatic in 1882, came to the United States in 1908 and went into sardine fishing at Fish Harbor two years later. In 1917, the company's own history says, he and four associates started the French Sardine Company. (The Los Angeles Conservancy dates it to 1918; the company held its centennial in 2017.) The name came later. The trademark register records first use of STARKIST on April 30, 1940, in a registration issued to "French Sardine Company of California." The company's own history says 1942. By 1952, the Conservancy says, the new Terminal Island plant was "the single-largest cannery in the world," and in 1953 the firm became StarKist Foods. Production on the island ended in 1984.
Incorporated: Delaware. StarKist Co. was formed on June 19, 2008, according to the disclosure Dongwon Industries filed in Korea that September. It is the corporation named in the plea agreement, and it is the owner of record on the StarKist and Charlie trademark registrations today.
Head office: 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor, Reston, Virginia, opened in April 2022 "with room for more than 70 employees." That describes the office, not the staff; the company does not publish a headcount. Before Reston, for about ten years, it was 225 North Shore Drive in Pittsburgh. Before Pittsburgh it was Newport, Kentucky, until Heinz moved it in 2000. Before Newport, Terminal Island. The parent company's head office is at 68 Mabang-ro, Seocho-gu, Seoul.
Shareholders: one. "StarKist Co. is a direct wholly owned subsidiary of Dongwon Industries Co., Ltd.," the company says, and Dongwon's filings agree. Dongwon Industries has been listed in Korea since 1989, but only three holders own more than five percent of it: Chairman Kim Nam-jung with 53.74 percent, his father Kim Jae-chul with 13.51 percent, and Dongwon's educational foundation with 9.70 percent. With other related parties, the total stood at 78.96 percent at the end of 2025. Korea's National Pension Service is not on the list. The 17,972 minority shareholders together held 18.97 percent.
Made: Pago Pago, American Samoa, since 1963. The Government Accountability Office wrote in 2020 that StarKist "now operates the single remaining cannery in American Samoa." The territory's government said in 2025 that the plant processes "more than 100,000 tons of tuna annually, producing over 500 million cans." Not every can comes from there. "Most of our tuna is produced in American Samoa (which is a territory of the United States), Ecuador or Senegal. A few of our products are manufactured in Thailand," the company's FAQ says, and it adds a rule a shopper can use in the aisle: if a product does not state a country of origin, "you can assume it has been produced in the United States or a US territory." Even the empty cans are Dongwon's. They come from TALOFA SYSTEMS, a Dongwon Systems subsidiary on the same island.
Paycheck: StarKist Samoa Co., owned by StarKist Co., owned by Dongwon Industries. About 2,300 people work at the cannery, by the company's count in 2023 and the territory's congressional delegate's in 2025. The minimum wage that applies to them, the rate for fish canning, processing and can manufacturing, has been $6.36 an hour since September 30, 2024. The federal minimum is $7.25. In 2018, the GAO found, "more than 90 percent of cannery workers earned within 50 cents of the minimum wage."
A wharf in Los Angeles, a registry in Delaware, an office park in Virginia, a family-controlled holding company in Seoul, a cannery in the South Pacific. Five places for six answers.
What does a Korean company own when it owns StarKist?
That is the question under every other question here, and the paperwork from 2008 answers it more precisely than the headlines did.
StarKist had changed hands before. Heinz bought it in 1963, keeping the founder's son, Joseph Bogdanovich, as chief executive, and in December 2002 folded it into Del Monte in a deal that left Heinz shareholders with about 74.5 percent of Del Monte. Six years later Del Monte wanted out.
On June 29, 2008, Del Monte announced an agreement to sell its seafood business, StarKist included, to three Dongwon companies, Dongwon Enterprise, Dongwon F&B and Dongwon Industries, "for $363 million, subject to a working capital adjustment." The deal closed in early October for approximately $359 million. Both numbers are correct. The first is what was agreed; the second is what was paid at closing.
Rick Wolford, Del Monte's chief executive, gave the seller's reasons in a sentence that reads, in hindsight, like a label on the can. The business had a "heavy dependence on a single input cost" and sat in "a comparatively lower growth category," so "StarKist was no longer an ideal fit for Del Monte." He also called it "an extraordinary business with very strong brand recognition and a loyal consumer base." Ingu Park, for the buyers, said the purchase would help Dongwon "establish a strong foothold and penetration in the U.S. market." At the closing he called StarKist "a 65-year old brand," which would date it to 1943. That makes three birthdays for the name: 1940 on the register, 1942 in the company history, 1943 by the buyer's arithmetic. The business behind it claims a fourth, 1917.
What Dongwon did not buy was the company founded in 1917. Del Monte's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission describes three separate moves. Del Monte sold StarKist Co. "all of the outstanding stock" of three subsidiaries, merged Star-Kist Samoa into a new Dongwon subsidiary, and sold StarKist Co. "certain assets" used to make and sell StarKist products. The brand, the plants and the subsidiaries went into a container, and the container was the Delaware corporation Dongwon had set up ten days before the contract was signed.
Nor did Dongwon own all of the container at first. The Korean filings show Dongwon Industries taking 60 percent of StarKist Co. in September 2008. The other 40 percent went to two private equity funds whose names, as spelled in the filing, begin "KDB Value" and "KD Value." They appear to be affiliated with the Korea Development Bank, though I could not establish who managed or financed them. The funds held a put option. They exercised it in 2013, and by Dongwon's 2014 annual report StarKist Co. was 100 percent Dongwon.
The parent has changed shape since. Dongwon Enterprise, the holding company that signed the 2008 contract, no longer exists; Dongwon Industries absorbed it on November 1, 2022, and became a holding company under Korean competition law. In July 2025 it bought out the remaining shareholders of Dongwon F&B, the company that sells Dongwon tuna in Korea, where Nielsen put its 2025 share of the canned tuna market at 78.9 percent. Since then StarKist and Korea's dominant tuna brand have been sibling subsidiaries, each wholly owned by the same parent.
One comparison helps with scale. By my arithmetic, the $359 million closing price is about 45 percent of StarKist's 2025 revenue of $806 million. Dongwon bought the leading name in American tuna for less than six months of what that name now sells.
The conspiracy began when the company was three
The plea agreement describes the crime in one long sentence. StarKist joined a "conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by reaching agreements to fix, raise, and maintain the prices of packaged seafood sold in the United States beginning at least as early as November 2011 and continuing through at least as late as December 2013." Packaged seafood, for these purposes, "consists of canned tuna fish." The commerce affected was "at least $600 million," which by my arithmetic is about 1.7 times what Dongwon paid for StarKist.
November 2011 is three years and five months after June 19, 2008. The corporation built to hold StarKist was not yet four years old when the conspiracy began.
There were only two competitors that mattered. When Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee abandoned a proposed merger in December 2015 after the Justice Department raised serious concerns, the department described a market "long dominated by three major brands" and the merger as a union of the "second and third largest" sellers. StarKist was the first.
According to the Associated Press, it was after that merger collapsed that Chicken of the Sea's executives went to investigators, and prosecutors "agreed to shield the company from criminal prosecution in exchange for cooperation." The first charges came in December 2016, against a Bumble Bee senior vice president. Stephen Hodge of StarKist was charged in May 2017, and his guilty plea was announced that June. Bumble Bee agreed to plead guilty and to a $25 million fine, a sum that would rise to as much as $81.5 million if the company were sold. Christopher Lischewski, Bumble Bee's chief executive, went to trial, and a jury convicted him in December 2019. Before the conspiracy, Washington State's attorney general later said, he had complained to other tuna executives that canned tuna was "too cheap." He was sentenced to forty months in prison. The Ninth Circuit, upholding the verdict, called the evidence "overwhelming."
Hodge was sentenced in January 2021 to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement, a $25,000 fine and 120 hours of community service. Before sentencing he wrote to the judge, and the trade publication SeafoodSource quoted one line of that letter: "the increased profits were not enough to satisfy Dongwon." That is a defendant's claim, made to a judge he was asking for leniency, and reported secondhand. In the material I have seen, it is the only sentence that places the Korean parent inside the motive, and it has never been tested.
What the cartel cost a shopper is, necessarily, an estimate. Washington's attorney general offered one: "a consumer who would have normally paid $1 for a five-ounce can of chunk light tuna … may have instead have paid $1.08 as a result of this conspiracy." Eight cents a can. By my arithmetic, a household that bought a dozen cans paid, on that estimate, for almost a thirteenth.
The statutory maximum
The law caps the fine for this offense at $100 million. The federal sentencing guidelines, as the plea agreement applied them, pointed higher: a range of $120 million to $240 million. The ceiling was lower than the floor of the range, so the ceiling became the number.
The agreement left StarKist one opening. It could ask the court for less, but "in no event… a fine less than $50 million," and the government wrote into the same document that "The United States intends to oppose any such request."
StarKist asked. At sentencing in San Francisco on September 11, 2019, the company argued, as the Associated Press reported, that a $100 million fine "could bankrupt it," and requested $50 million. R. Scott Meece, the general counsel who had signed the plea agreement for the company, said StarKist might have to consider layoffs or moving its Samoa plant to Thailand. The GAO, citing the sentencing record, put it more starkly: "According to StarKist Co.'s General Counsel, the company will potentially have to close the cannery in American Samoa and move operations to a foreign country to afford to pay the fine for price-fixing."
Judge Edward M. Chen was not persuaded. In the Justice Department's words, he "found that StarKist had not proven that its financial circumstances justified a lower criminal fine." The Antitrust Division had argued that StarKist "had sufficient financial resources to pay a $100 million criminal fine." The sentence was the full $100 million, "the statutory maximum," and thirteen months of probation.
This is the most commonly garbled fact in the whole affair, so it is worth putting flatly. The fine was not reduced.
What the judge allowed was time. The AP reported the schedule: "$5 million within 30 days and $11 million next year. Starting in 2021… payments of $21 million each year for four years." The installments add up to exactly $100 million. Dongwon's own 2019 annual report records the same thing in Korean: a $100 million fine, repaid over five years from October 2019.
Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general who ran the Antitrust Division, supplied the moral: "When a corporation cheats customers at the checkout line, the Antitrust Division will hold it accountable to the greatest extent." The greatest extent, in this case, had a number written into the statute, and StarKist got that number.
The cannery did not move.
Penalties against price
Now set the two sides of the ledger next to each other, because the comparison is the plainest way to see what owning an American brand came to cost its Korean owner.
The criminal fine was $100 million. The civil cases, brought by wholesalers, commercial food buyers and ordinary shoppers and consolidated in federal court in the Southern District of California, ended in 2024 with settlements that Dongwon's 2025 annual report totals at $219 million. The same report says the group has now settled with every plaintiff. In 2024 StarKist posted a net loss of ₩69.5 billion.
The settlements had their own texture. Shoppers were to receive $130 million from StarKist, paid in installments over eighteen months, and payments to the consumer class began on September 8, 2026. Direct purchasers, the wholesalers and retailers, got $58.75 million from StarKist and Dongwon together, of which $32.65 million was cash and $26.1 million was tuna. A company that had admitted fixing the price of canned tuna paid part of the bill in its own product.
Add the fine and the 2024 settlements and you get $319 million. By my arithmetic that is 88.9 percent of the roughly $359 million Dongwon paid at closing, or 87.9 percent of the $363 million agreed in June 2008. And it is a floor, not a total. It leaves out the 2019 settlement with Walmart, reported at $20.5 million in "cash and commercial terms," and the other agreements that came before 2024.
Put it at the scale of a household purchase. For every hundred dollars Dongwon paid for StarKist, it and the company it owns later paid at least $88.90 more for what was done on its watch.
The strongest case that ownership had nothing to do with it
It bears saying, and not grudgingly, that almost none of this is evidence that foreign ownership causes anything.
Look at who owned the three companies while their executives were agreeing on prices. StarKist belonged to Dongwon, in Korea. Bumble Bee belonged to Lion Capital, a British private equity firm. Chicken of the Sea belonged to Thai Union, in Thailand. Three owners in three countries, and the same conduct. The only person who went to prison ran Bumble Bee. Only two companies were convicted, and Chicken of the Sea, by the AP's account, avoided prosecution by cooperating. Of the four individuals charged, none was Korean and none was a Dongwon executive.
On StarKist's side, the criminal case touched StarKist Co. alone. Dongwon Industries was not a party to the plea. In the civil litigation it was a defendant and a settling party, but it disputed liability, and that litigation ended in settlement without any court finding it liable. The losses to shoppers came from the cartel, and the cartel included the chief executive of a British-owned competitor. The low wage in Pago Pago, which comes up next, was written by the United States Congress.
And the best argument of all is the one about the plant. When StarKist told a federal judge that it might have to move the Samoa cannery abroad to pay the fine, the judge imposed the maximum anyway, and the cannery stayed. Whatever leverage a foreign owner might be imagined to hold over American institutions, it did not work here.
I think this case is largely right. A Korean owner did not teach American tuna executives to fix prices, and a Korean owner did not shield them. But the case answers a question this piece is not asking. The question is not whether foreign ownership caused the cartel. It is where, in a structure scattered across six cells, ownership becomes concrete: the point at which the owner in Seoul stops being an abstraction and becomes a party with a name.
There are three such points in the record.
The first is the board consent: six names on the paper attached to a federal plea, the founder's first.
The second is in the civil case. When the direct purchasers asked the court to approve their settlement in 2024, they explained why they were accepting it, and the trade press quoted the filing: "StarKist does not have assets sufficient to cover the financial exposure… and that DWI and the Lion Companies do not have assets in the United States that could be attached." DWI is Dongwon Industries. This is the plaintiffs' argument, made to justify taking less, and not a finding by the court. But it states exactly what distance does in a courtroom. A parent company with nothing in the United States to seize can be sued and still be hard to collect from.
The third is in Washington State. In June 2020 Attorney General Ferguson sued StarKist, "its parent company Dongwon Industries" and Lischewski in state court. In February 2021 a King County Superior Court judge, Julie Spector, found StarKist liable under the state's Consumer Protection Act and "rejected a motion from Dongwon Industries asking the judge to dismiss" the case against it. That is not a finding of liability either. It means only that the Korean parent had to stay in the case. How it ended, I could not confirm.
A United States wage that is not the United States wage
The cannery is where the six questions stop being abstract and start being hourly.
American Samoa got its tuna industry by government design. In the 1950s, the GAO writes, citing the Congressional Research Service, "the Department of the Interior contracted with Van Camp Seafood Company to move onto the island and develop a fish processing plant." StarKist followed in 1963. Chicken of the Sea closed its Samoa cannery in September 2009. Two months later, on November 4, 2009, James P. Walsh of the South Pacific Tuna Corporation told a House subcommittee: "The only currently operating tuna processing plant on American Samoa is owned by the StarKist Seafoods, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dong Won." Thirteen months after the closing, the congressional record already had the ownership right.
Tri Marine, which reopened the old Chicken of the Sea plant in 2015, "suspended its canning operations in American Samoa indefinitely" at the end of 2016, and StarKist leased the facility in 2018. The companies that pulled back told the GAO the minimum wage was "a minor factor."
That wage is the strangest fact in this story, and it has nothing to do with Korea. The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 set separate minimum wages for American Samoa, industry by industry, and Congress has amended the schedule several times since. Under the current version the rates rise by forty cents every three years until they reach the federal minimum. For "Fish Canning, Processing, Can Manufacturing," the Labor Department's table reads $6.36, effective September 30, 2024.
By my arithmetic, an eight-hour day at $6.36 comes to $50.88. The same day at the federal $7.25 would be $58.00. The difference is $7.12 a day, and a full year of 2,080 hours at the Samoa rate comes to about $13,229. The next step, if the law is not changed again, is $6.76 in September 2027; at forty cents every three years, the rate would not reach $7.25 until 2033.
The GAO also measured how close the workers sit to that floor. In 2018, "more than 90 percent of cannery workers earned within 50 cents of the minimum wage." More than nine in ten, within two quarters of the legal minimum.
The territory's government says the tuna industry "supports over 83% of private-sector jobs." When StarKist's general counsel raised the prospect of moving the plant abroad in 2019, what he put on the table was the largest private employer in a United States territory whose private-sector jobs, by its own government's count, rest mostly on tuna.
The politics have since run the other way. In April 2025 a presidential proclamation reopened commercial fishing in parts of the Pacific Remote Islands monument, on the condition that "Only United States flagged vessels shall be allowed to commercially fish." In November 2025 Amata Radewagen, American Samoa's delegate in the House, wrote to the U.S. Trade Representative: "I urge you to maintain the 19 percent tariff on Thai tuna." Six years earlier, StarKist's general counsel had said the fine might push the plant to Thailand. Now the territory's representative in Washington was asking for a tariff wall against Thai tuna, to protect a cannery a Korean company owns.
Sorry, Charlie
In 1958 StarKist hired the Chicago agency Leo Burnett to "establish a quality image for StarKist® tuna and distinguish it from its main competitor." The answer, in 1961, was a tuna who wanted to be caught. Charlie has good taste, and that is his problem. The narrator's line, in the company's own timeline, is "Sorry Charlie®, StarKist® doesn't want tuna with good taste, but tuna that tastes good!" For more than sixty years the brand's mascot has been a fish the company keeps turning down.
The rejection is registered property now. The SORRY CHARLIE! registration in force today was filed on July 29, 2020 and issued on May 24, 2022, to StarKist Co., under Dongwon's ownership. The oldest StarKist registration, No. 381518, for the name itself, dates from 1940; it was last renewed in 2020, and it too belongs to "StarKist Co., a corporation organized in DELAWARE, 1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor, Reston, Virginia 20190." The youngest company holds the oldest mark.
Younger than the can
Go back to the consent. It is a short document, and like most corporate paperwork it is written so that nothing personal can be read into it. But it does something the rest of the structure is built not to do. It gathers the six cells onto one page.
A brand born on a wharf in Los Angeles. A corporation organized in Delaware. An office in Reston. A cannery in Pago Pago paying a wage Congress set below its own. A parent listed in Korea and controlled, through 78.96 percent of its shares, by a chairman, his father and the parties around them. At the moment that structure had to admit a federal crime, it needed six men to write their names in a column, and the first was the founder's.
Signing did not make them conspirators, and this piece has tried to be careful about that. It made ownership visible in the only form a court can see.
The plea agreement's description of the defendant has not changed, and it is still accurate: "a corporation organized and existing under the laws of Delaware." The can has been on American shelves since 1940. The company that answered for it was ten years old.
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