An Italian ice-cream seller, three continents and a bugle.

D’Onofrio began with one man and one cart. Pedro D’Onofrio, born Pietro in 1859 in Sessa Aurunca, in the Italian region of Campania, left home at 21 for Argentina, Infobae reported in 2024. Spanish Wikipedia says that in Buenos Aires he took over a small ice-cream business from a family friend, Raffaele Cimarelli, and learned to make ice cream. In 1888 he went back to Italy to see his mother, married Raffaella Di Paolo and set out again for the Americas. The couple ended up in the United States, and at Cimarelli’s urging settled in Richmond, Virginia, where Pedro made ice cream again.

Cimarelli later moved to Peru and invited the couple to follow him to Lima, a city with a climate suited to selling ice cream. The D’Onofrios arrived at the end of 1897, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing the 1945 reference book Perú en cifras, bringing from Richmond a wooden, hand-pushed cart for selling ice cream in the street. That cart is the origin of the brand.

The business was built on sound as much as taste. Pedro announced himself in the streets of Lima with a bugle call, the toque de corneta, and sold a cream ice cream called Imperial, Infobae reported in 2024; the Italian-Peruvian newspaper Il Messaggero told the same story in 2014. The family moved from Pachacamilla to Calle Granados and then to Chacarilla, where it stayed until 1914 before moving to Avenida Grau. Spanish Wikipedia says Pedro at first used snow brought down from the Andes, and that in 1908 he bought a plant for making artificial ice, his first step towards industry, and had more carts built to his own design. The bright yellow carts of the street sellers became a familiar sight in Lima, Infobae says.

Chocolate, Sublime and a panettone.

Pedro handed the business to his eldest son. Antonio D’Onofrio Di Paolo, who had been studying in Italy, was called back to Lima in 1911 to be trained as his successor, Spanish Wikipedia says, and in 1919 the business took the name “Antonio D’Onofrio, sucesor de Pedro D’Onofrio.” Pedro and Raffaella returned to Italy; Pedro later came back to Peru, and he died in 1937 at the age of 78, Gestión reported in 2023.

Antonio’s task was to keep the factory busy all year, because ice cream sold for only part of it. His answer was chocolate. In 1924 D’Onofrio installed its first chocolate factory, with industrial equipment bought in Europe, on the jirón Cotabambas next to the ice and ice-cream plant, Infobae and Gestión reported. Two years later, in 1926, came the chocolate Sublime, after two years of work, Gestión reported. As other brothers returned from Italy with technical training, Spanish Wikipedia says, the firm added sweets, biscuits and other confectionery.

A third pillar was Christmas. Spanish Wikipedia says Antonio signed an agreement with the Milan company Alemagna, buying its formula for panettone and the right to use the characteristic presentation of the Alemagna product, in which the letter A stood for Milan’s cathedral; D’Onofrio did the same with a D for the first panettone it sold in Peru. Gestión dates the panettone to the 1950s. The news site Perú.com called D’Onofrio the most-consumed panettone brand in Peru in 2007. In 1950 the company moved to a 36,000 m² site on the former Fundo Aramburú, on Avenida Venezuela, and a fully modernised ice-cream plant followed there in the early 1960s, Spanish Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and all of them come from Peru or Mexico: Gloria, D’Onofrio, San Jorge, La Moderna, Lala, Alpura and Bachoco. Food brands from these two countries in general 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 neighbourhood 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 food is 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 food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a family firm to Gloria and Nestlé.

The family kept the company for most of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, amid Peru’s economic crisis and political instability, the D’Onofrio family sold shares to the Peruvian dairy group Gloria, which took full control in 1990, Gestión reported in 2023. Grupo Gloria held it for seven years and then sold it to Nestlé in 1997, according to the same report; Spanish Wikipedia dates the sale to April 1997. Under Nestlé Perú the brand kept its factory on Avenida Venezuela in Lima, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing El Comercio in 2026.

The bugle survived the change of owner. In 1997 one of Peru’s first sound marks, based on the D’Onofrio bugle call, was registered with the national intellectual-property office Indecopi, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing the official newspaper El Peruano. The carts are still part of the brand: Spanish Wikipedia says D’Onofrio ice creams are sold through shops and through the company’s own street carts. Its range runs from the Peziduri family ice creams and D’Onito to the D’Ono Sándwich, alongside ice-cream versions of the Sublime chocolate and of Nestlé’s KitKat. In January 2026 the trade site Perú Retail described D’Onofrio as holding a dominant share of the Peruvian ice-cream market, ahead of local brands such as Artika and Yámboli.

A new owner is in prospect. On 20 February 2026 Nestlé announced that it would sell its remaining ice-cream businesses to Froneri, its joint venture with the investment firm PAI Partners, with the transfer to take place during 2026 and early 2027, FoodNavigator reported; the report named Peru among the main markets of that business. El Comercio reported the same day that Nestlé was evaluating the details and next steps in Peru.

For a design guide, D’Onofrio shows how a street cart, a bugle call and a single letter on a panettone can carry an immigrant’s name through more than a century and three owners. Compare Cacaosuyo, a Peruvian fine-chocolate maker, and Peters, Australia’s long-running ice-cream brand. For this guide we use a cart yellow, a bugle red and a chocolate brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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