A Turkish-delight business in Vinohrady.

Orion is one of the oldest names in Czech chocolate, and its starting date depends on the source. Nestlé, which owns the brand today, says Orion has been going since its founding in 1896. Czech Wikipedia traces the business to 1891, when František Maršner and his wife Albína set up a confectionery business in Královské Vinohrady, now part of Prague, making Turkish delight. We give both dates.

Chocolate followed. Czech Wikipedia says permission to build a factory in Vinohrady was granted in 1897, and that in 1901 the firm was registered as a joint-stock company whose name translates as the First Czech Joint-Stock Company of Factories for Oriental Confectionery and Chocolate in Královské Vinohrady. Its early products, the same article says, included Turkish delight, cocoa, rum pralines, chocolate-covered bananas, cat’s-tongue chocolates and tablet chocolate.

The name came later. According to Czech Wikipedia, the company began using the Orion brand in 1924, and in 1928 it adopted the company name Orion, továrny na čokoládu, a.s., Praha — Orion chocolate factories, Prague.

After the Second World War the company lost its independence. In April 1947, Czech Wikipedia says, Orion and the Prague chocolate maker RUPA were nationalised and merged into the state enterprise Pražské čokoládovny. RUPA, founded by Rudolf Pachl, had bought property in Modřany in July 1932 and started making chocolate there on 3 October that year. Production was concentrated at Modřany, and the former Orion factory in Vinohrady was the last of the old sites to close, in 1952.

A blue four-pointed star by Zdeněk Rykr.

Orion’s mark is a blue four-pointed star. Czech Wikipedia credits it to Zdeněk Rykr, a painter and graphic artist who began working with the firm in 1921 and designed a series of its packaging and advertising items, including the star. The article does not give a year for the star itself. Czech Wikipedia’s article on Rykr, a painter, illustrator, journalist and stage designer influenced by surrealism, adds that he also produced advertising for the Maršner factory in script lettering.

His work is still on the shelf. The same article says Kofila, a coffee-flavoured chocolate bar first made in 1923, still carries Rykr’s original design of a seated figure enjoying a cup of coffee. Nestlé lists Kofila among the Orion products made today.

The star has stayed with the brand through every change of owner described below — from the Maršner family company to a state enterprise, then to a privatised joint-stock company and finally to Nestlé. Nestlé’s Czech website still presents Orion under its own name, calling it one of the most significant symbols of Czech sweet tradition for more than a hundred years.

Orion also became a family of product names. Nestlé dates Studentská pečeť (“student’s seal”), a chocolate known for combining ingredients such as fruit and nuts, to 1975, and links it from its own page to the Orion brand site. Nestlé’s Orion page lists bonbonnière lines including Modré z nebe, Kofila and Maraska, alongside dark, white and cooking chocolate.

Chocolate makers around the world.

The seven brands in this group all make chocolate, and they come from six countries on four continents: Ganong and Chocolats Favoris from Canada, Abuelita from Mexico, La Ibérica from Peru, Glico from Japan, Orion from the Czech Republic and Simón Coll from Spain. Read together, they show how differently a chocolate name can be built, kept and presented from one market to the next.

A chocolate brand can belong to the family that started it or to a group that bought it later, and the name on the wrapper and the company that owns it are not always the same thing. It can be known for bars and boxed chocolates, for a drink or for a seasonal novelty, and its packaging can draw on very different local traditions. Each guide looks at how one brand’s own history shows up in what it puts on the shelf.

Each guide also separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Modřany to Olomouc under Nestlé.

Privatisation came in 1992. Czech Wikipedia says that year the joint-stock company Čokoládovny was formed with two foreign partners: a joint venture of France’s Danone group, and Switzerland’s Nestlé. Nestlé describes itself as an important partner in that privatisation, through which it gained brands including Orion, Granko and Hašlerky. In January 1999, Nestlé says, it put all its Czech activities under unified management based in Prague, and in October 2001 its food and chocolate divisions merged to form Nestlé Česko.

Production then moved to Moravia. Czech Wikipedia says manufacturing, together with the Orion brand, was transferred from Modřany to the Zora factory in Olomouc, leaving mainly cocoa-bean processing in Prague until production at Modřany stopped at the end of October 2004, when only just over 70 people still worked there. The same article says that since 1999 Orion products have been made in Olomouc or in Hungary. Nestlé’s own history says its Czech chocolate production was concentrated in two plants, Zora in Olomouc and Sfinx in Holešov, and that the Olomouc plant became the leading producer in the category, mainly because of the Orion brand. Nestlé says it redeveloped the Modřany site as Belárie Park and moved its Czech headquarters there in July 2006.

Today Nestlé says its Zora plant, whose origins it dates to 1898, makes chocolate tablets and pralines under the Orion brand — including Studentská pečeť and Kofila — as well as export brands such as After Eight and Aero, and employs more than 600 people; it puts the plant’s output at more than 40,000 tonnes of chocolate a year. The sources we checked do not say where Orion’s cocoa comes from. Nestlé links to orioncokolada.cz as the brand’s own site.

For a design guide, Orion shows how a mark drawn in the 1920s can outlast nationalisation, privatisation and a move from Prague to Olomouc. Compare Wawel, Kraków’s chocolate maker since 1898, and Kalev, Estonia’s confectioner since 1806. For this guide we use a star blue, a cocoa brown and a cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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