A feed company, a promise and a cooperative.

Dos Pinos is a cooperative: its formal name is the Cooperativa de Productores de Leche Dos Pinos R.L., abbreviated COOPROLE R.L., and it is owned by its members, who share in its profits according to their holdings, English Wikipedia says. It is regulated under Costa Rica’s general law on cooperatives and has its head office in Alajuela.

The cooperative’s own history, published on its website in the early 2000s, traces the idea back to 1945, when Juan Bautista Sanabria and Bruce Masís Dibiassi set up the Compañía Inversora de Fomento Agropecuario (CIFA), which made animal feed and sold dairy equipment. One article of its charter, the company says, provided that it would be turned into a milk producers’ cooperative within two years. Dairy farmers at the time, it adds, had no organisation of their own and had to deal individually with prices set by intermediaries.

On 26 August 1947, 25 dairy producers met to found the cooperative. A later company history says the meeting was held at the Cámara de Agricultura y Agroindustria, on the threshold of the political crisis that ended in Costa Rica’s civil war of 1948, and that the cooperative grew out of a movement promoted by the Banco Nacional de Costa Rica’s section for agricultural and industrial cooperatives. La Nación reported the same founding by 25 farmers in 2007, as cited by Spanish Wikipedia. The founding minutes set three aims: to sell their milk to a company of their own that would pay them a fair price; to buy the inputs for their farms from a company of their own; and to promote Costa Rica’s industrial and social development. At that first meeting, the company says, Alfredo Hernández Volio was elected manager and Bernardo Yglesias Rodríguez president of the board.

Feed came before milk. The cooperative started its feed plant on 1 November 1948 and, with the help of the Banco Nacional, bought CIFA’s assets; in 1949 it opened its first feed distributor, in Turrialba, the company says.

A square bottle and two pines in a circle.

The cooperative then turned to milk. At a session on 7 August 1950, its history says, the board decided to buy a plot in Barrio Luján in San José, buy machinery and put up a building of its own, even though the financing was not complete. In October 1950, while the plant was being built, the management chose the bottle the milk would be sold in: the square bottle bearing the cooperative’s name, whose cap carried the logo and whose over-cap carried a picture of the plant building. The company dates the bottling and pasteurisation plant to 1951, processing 400 bottles of milk a day; English Wikipedia dates the start of processing and pasteurisation to 1952. Because no one in the country had run such a plant, the company says, the labourers who had built it were hired and trained to pasteurise milk.

The name came out of the same preparations. When the board discussed a brand for the cheese, butter and other products it planned to make, members began suggesting names at random, and board member Rodolfo Fernández Gutiérrez proposed “Dos Pinos”, “two pines,” the company says. It was a reference to the cooperative movement’s emblem of two pine trees enclosed in a circle, a symbol of cooperation and fecundity. The cooperative’s history sheet of the early 2010s is headed by a script Dos Pinos wordmark and a roundel with two pines.

The range widened decade by decade, by the company’s account: an ice-cream plant in 1953, a cheese plant in 1959, a powdered-milk plant in 1960 that it says was donated by the World Health Organization, a plant for natilla, Costa Rica’s soured cream, in 1972, and a new powdered-milk plant later in the decade, which English Wikipedia places at Ciudad Quesada in 1978. In 1985 it installed an aseptic Tetra Brik filling plant for long-life milk, and in 1989 it moved fluid milk from bags to cartons.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Central America, Peru or Jamaica: Flor de Caña, Zacapa, Toña, Dos Pinos, Big Cola, Grace and Walkerswood. Food and drink brands from this part of the world sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms and cooperatives that still carry a founder’s or a place’s name to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a label, a name and the meal or occasion it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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, bottled 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 labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From San José to the region.

Exports began in 1988, with what the company and English Wikipedia call its first formal export order. In 2000 a new plant opened at El Coyol de Alajuela, followed by plants for cheese and powdered milk in San Carlos in the 1990s and a feed plant at Ciruelas de Alajuela in 2006, the company says. It set up a subsidiary in Nicaragua in 2005.

Expansion through Central America followed. In 2007 Dos Pinos opened operations in Guatemala, building a large distribution centre there, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing La Nación; in 2021 the same paper reported investment in a dairy plant in that country. In 2008, through an alliance with Cooleche, Dos Pinos milk went on sale in Panama, and in 2013 the cooperative bought the Planta Nevada, which makes milk and juice drinks, from Cervecería Nacional de Panamá, La Nación reported at the time. Spanish and English Wikipedia say it bought the industrial dairy company La Completa in Chontales, Nicaragua, in August 2015.

The cooperative has also moved beyond dairy. In September 2016 it bought the Gallito confectionery business from Mondelez International, including its plants and brands, El Financiero reported; and in 2017 it opened its first ice-cream parlour under the name La Estación, which Spanish Wikipedia, citing El Financiero and La República, says has since expanded across the country. Spanish Wikipedia says the portfolio now runs to more than 600 products, sold across Central America and the Caribbean, under names including Pinito, Delactomy, Trits and Morenito, alongside the Dos Pinos brand itself. In the early 2010s the company said it had more than 1,900 member producers and workers.

For a design guide, Dos Pinos shows how a cooperative emblem chosen at a board meeting in 1950 can carry a farmers’ brand from one square bottle to a regional group. Compare Amul, India’s dairy cooperative, and Tillamook, the farmer-owned Oregon cooperative. For this guide we use a pine green, a pasture green and a milk white with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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