A spa town in the Carpathian foothills.

Morshynska is named after Morshyn, a small town in Ukraine’s Lviv Oblast, in the Stryi district, on the foothills of the Eastern Carpathians. Long before the water was bottled for shops, the town was known for it. English Wikipedia says Morshyn has been known as a spa resort since 1878, and that the first chemical analysis of its mineral water was made in 1881 by a professor of Lviv University.

Ukrainian Wikipedia connects the springs to Bonifacy Stiller, the figure usually credited with founding the resort, and traces local salt-working in the area back to the sixteenth century. Between the world wars, when the town was part of Poland, “Morszyn-Zdrój” became a popular spa, English Wikipedia says, managed by a Lviv medical association and drawing almost a thousand guests a year by the late 1920s; researchers of the time compared its waters with those of well-known German, Hungarian and Czech resorts.

The bottled brand is far younger than the resort. The Morshyn mineral-water plant, called Oskar, opened in 1995, according to both the brand’s own website and Ukrainian Wikipedia, which cites the Liga.net company database. The brand says the plant was substantially rebuilt in 2007, turning it into one of the most powerful production complexes in Ukraine; Ukrainian Wikipedia puts its capacity at up to five million bottles a day.

Ukrainian Wikipedia also records that in 2000 the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine designated the Morshyn deposit a unique mineral-water deposit.

From spring to bottle, in one valley.

The brand describes its source as a protected valley near Morshyn, surrounded by beech forest. On its website it explains that the water flows from capped springs by pipeline to the plant, where it passes only through mechanical sand filtering to remove natural sediment such as clay before bottling; Ukrainian Wikipedia gives the same account and adds that the water flows to the plant without pumps. The brand also says that rainwater from the Carpathian highlands reaches the source through ancient underground riverbeds of the Dniester, filtered by the rock along the way. Its slogan, in Ukrainian, says that the water “remains as nature created it.”

Ukrainian Wikipedia classes Morshynska as a natural mineral water of low mineralisation, at 0.1 to 0.3 grams per litre. The brand says it was entered in the European Commission’s register of natural mineral waters in March 2017, and that it received a Superior Taste Award from the International Taste & Quality Institute in 2016.

The range is broad. Morshynska is sold still, lightly carbonated and highly carbonated, in bottles from 0.33 to 6 litres, Ukrainian Wikipedia says, alongside sub-brands such as Morshynska Plus, a lemonade and Morshynka. The brand’s website also lists glass bottles, sports bottles and lines for children and teenagers, and an energy drink, Volya, made at the same plant. Ukrainian Wikipedia’s article on the producer adds that the Morshyn plant also bottles Alaska water, and its article on the brand lists further variants including a pine-flavoured Morshynska Plus and a line called AntiOxi.

The producer is IDS Ukraine, which Ukrainian Wikipedia says was founded in 1996 and also runs a plant in Myrhorod, in Poltava Oblast, home of Myrhorodska water, which runs three production lines and also fills the Alaska and Aqua Life brands. Ukrainian Wikipedia dates the Myrhorod mineral-water plant to 1927, with a new facility commissioned in 1974. The same article says the group held about 40 per cent of Ukraine’s bottled-water market in 2024.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Ukraine or Lithuania: Konti, Svitoch, Nemiroff, Morshynska, Obolon, Švyturys and Rokiškio. Food and drink brands from these two countries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that grew out of a single town or plant to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the taste 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 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 lighter bottle and a forest story.

The documented design change is about material. Ukrainian Wikipedia says a 2020 bottle redesign cut the plastic used by 15 per cent, and that the large 3-litre and 6-litre bottles lost their 8.4-gram plastic handles in favour of 1.3-gram ribbons.

The brand’s public story leans on the Carpathian landscape around its source. Ukrainian Wikipedia says that in 2017 it planted 100,000 trees in three Carpathian nature reserves with WWF, and that since 2019 it has funded a “Save the Lynx” conservation programme. It also sponsored a youth football tournament in 2012 and 2013. The same article says the plant passed a recertification audit under the FSSC 22000 food-safety standard in April 2025.

Ownership has been caught up in the war. Ukrainian Wikipedia says the corporate rights of the IDS group’s companies have been under arrest since June 2022, and that in March 2025 the assets were placed under the control of ARMA, Ukraine’s state agency for asset recovery and management.

For a design guide, Morshynska shows how a mineral water can build its identity on a single named place — a spa town, a valley and a forest — while its packaging changes around it. Compare Nemiroff, another Ukrainian drink named after its town, and Obolon. For this guide we use spring blue, deep water and mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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