A milling family from Livorno.

Allatini is a name from the industrial history of Thessaloniki. Greek Wikipedia describes it as a flour-milling company founded in 1858 in Thessaloniki by Moses Allatini and his brother, at a time when the city was part of the Ottoman Empire. Its account of the family begins earlier: it says the Allatinis settled in Thessaloniki in 1802, coming from Livorno in Italy, and set up a grain and flour trade with the Modiano family under the name Modiano & Allatini.

In 1836, Greek Wikipedia says, Moses Allatini set up a roller mill and a tile and pottery works, and the business was later renamed Fratelli Allatini — the Allatini Brothers. English Wikipedia’s article on the Allatini Mills says his sons founded that company, and it illustrates a brick stamped with the firm’s name and “Salonicco,” the Italian name for the city. The company had two branches, ceramics and flour milling, and the family was also active in banking, brewing and tobacco, Greek Wikipedia says.

In 1854, both Wikipedias say, the Allatinis built a flour mill with the French industrialist Darblay de Corblay; English Wikipedia, citing the architectural historian Vassilis Colonas, calls it the first steam mill in Thessaloniki. The family took full ownership in 1882, and in 1897 a public company, the Ottoman Industrial and Commercial Company of Thessaloniki, was formed to run the mill and the Allatini tile works.

The mill, the fire and the Poselli building.

The Allatini name survives most visibly in a building. In 1898 the mill burned down, and it was rebuilt to plans by the Italian architect Vitaliano Poselli; English Wikipedia, citing Colonas, says the new mill was inaugurated on 19 September 1900. The complex includes an administration building, warehouses, refrigeration areas and the roller-mill building, around a boiler room, a machine shop and a chimney of Belgian construction. Alexander Tzonis and Alcestis Rodi, in Greece: Modern Architectures in History, call it “one of the largest, if not the largest, industrial buildings in the Orient,” and Poselli’s most impressive work. Today the Allatini Mills near the Kalamaria district are a scheduled historic monument, abandoned and awaiting redevelopment, English Wikipedia says.

The family itself left. Greek Wikipedia says the Allatinis returned to Italy in 1911, selling much of their property, and that in 1926 the majority of the company’s shares passed to a group of Greek businessmen led by Kosmas Panoutsos.

After the Second World War, Greek Wikipedia continues, Allatini S.A. was listed on the Athens Stock Exchange in 1950. The mill burned again the next year and reopened in 1955. In 1964 the company split in two: Allatini S.A. kept the flour mill, and Keramia Allatini S.A. kept the ceramics works. In 1996 the milling business moved to the industrial area at Sindos, west of Thessaloniki, and in 1997 it founded a subsidiary for frozen dough. Between 2000 and 2003 it made further acquisitions and investments, including in Nigeria and in a Greek distributor of organic foods. In 2007 it bought a majority of the listed bread and rusk maker Katselis, and in 2008 the milling group absorbed Allatini S.A. and then merged with Katselis.

Food and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and all of them come from Greece, Switzerland or France: Lacta, Allatini, Papadopoulos, Minerva, Zweifel, Ragusa and Francine. Food brands from these three countries sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A world full of goodness.

The Allatini that shoppers see today is a brand for biscuits, cakes and packaged flour, and it belongs to a different company from the old mill. In the late 1980s, Greek Wikipedia says, Allatini set up two subsidiaries, a cereals company for northern Greece and the Hellenic Biscuit Company; the biscuit company was transferred to the Philippou group, together with the right to use the Allatini name for biscuits, packaged flour and some other foods. Greek Wikipedia’s article on biscuits adds that the Hellenic Biscuit Company was renamed ELBISCO in 2000, and ELBISCO says it was founded in 1987.

ELBISCO lists Allatini among its five brands, alongside Elite, Kris Kris, Vosinaki and Forma. Its Allatini range includes Soft Kings cookies, sandwich biscuits, Goody biscuits, Petit-Beurre, cakes, crackers, and flour and semolina for home baking under the name Spitika Zimomata — “home doughs” — as well as baking powder and dried yeast. The brand’s current line is “Allatini: A World Full of Goodness,” built on the Greek word kalosyni, goodness.

On manufacturing, ELBISCO says that 99.5% of its products are made in Greece, and that its plant at Glyfa, near Chalkida, built at the end of the 1960s, makes biscuits, crackers, cookies and cake and has an automatic flour-packing line; it also has a plant at Pikermi, east of Athens, for rusks and bread. We give those as the company’s statements.

For a design guide, Allatini shows how a nineteenth-century industrial name can live on as a supermarket brand long after the family and the mill have gone. Compare Papadopoulos, another Greek biscuit maker, and LU, the French maker of the Petit Beurre. For this guide we use a mill brick, flour white and a wheat gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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