The Big Brand Behind Costco's Kirkland Signature Tuna

Costco is beloved the world over for its delightful food court (including the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo), many membership perks, and high-quality house brand, Kirkland Signature. If you eat a lot of tuna, their Albacore solid white in particular is a great deal, as it's sold in 7-oz eight-packs for just $18.99 (most tuna cans are only five ounces). Yet those who know about house brands know that stores like Costco aren't out there catching their own tuna or making their own almond butter; they have a network of partner brands who manufacture the goods for them. So who is behind Costco's Kirkland Signature tuna?

Costco's tuna is actually manufactured by one of the biggest name brands in the canned fish industry: Bumble Bee Tuna. And while Costco sells its tuna for what amounts to $2.37 per can, a single 7-oz can of Bumble Bee Tuna sells on Amazon for $2.79, over 40 cents more, for what is exactly the same product.

In the early 2000s, Costco wasn't happy with what it perceived as low-quality tuna, so the company opted to shop around and find a tuna company that would work with it to make "tuna like it used to be," per CNN Money. That meant chunkier, meatier fish, and it opted to go with Bumble Bee. A year later, in 2002, after much research and testing, the tuna was on Costco's shelves, and they were projected to sell $30 million in 2003.

While Costco's Kirkland Signature brand tuna, produced by Bumble Bee, is slightly more expensive per ounce than other name brands sold in supermarkets, looking at the tuna contained within the cans side-by-side confirms that Costco made the right decision by upping its quality. It's much more chunky, much less flaky, and according to some, beats out other brands in taste, too.

Costco, no stranger to legal headaches, was named in a 2023 lawsuit as mislabeling its tuna as dolphin-safe. The case, brought by plaintiff Melinda Wright, alleges that the chain's claims to dolphin-safe practices is false, as Bumble Bee — the supplier of Kirkland Signature Albacore white tuna — uses fishing techniques that tends to net other sea creatures in its snare, including, to most people's outrage, dolphins.

In January, while Costco's attorneys claimed that the dolphin-safe logo was merely suggestive of the company's fishing practices and sought to have the case thrown out, a San Francisco federal judge disagreed and stated that the company did indeed give customers reasonable grounds on which to assume that the fish was ethically caught. This is significant, because, as the judge also pointed out, most customers prefer to buy tuna that purports to be dolphin-safe.

Indeed, Costco ranked 11th out of 16 on the 2022 Greenpeace USA Tuna Retailer Scorecard, with a score of 27% (out of 100); only Aldi scored above an F grade, with 62%. And in a separate lawsuit brought against Bumble Bee Seafood in March 2023, the fish company, which was acquired by a Taiwanese conglomerate in 2020, agreed to keep the phrase "fair and safe supply chain" off its website for a decade, per Intrafish.