A spa, a prince and a pavilion over the oldest spring.

Knjaz Miloš is bottled in Aranđelovac, a town in central Serbia that grew up around the mineral springs of Bukovička Banja, the Bukovik spa. The company dates its tradition to 1811. Its own history, which it says is largely based on Two Centuries of Bukovička Banja, a monograph by Zorica Petrović published by the National Museum in Aranđelovac, says that the physician Emmerich Lindenmeyer recorded a visit to the Bukovik springs in 1811 by Dositej Obradović, the writer and educator who became Serbia’s first minister of education. The same year, the company says, began a tradition of filling jugs, barrels and bottles with the water and taking it to the Serbian court by horse and ox cart. Serbian Wikipedia, citing the same museum monograph, gives the same 1811 starting point.

The company says Lindenmeyer carried out the first analysis of the water in 1836, and that in 1839 a visit by Princess Ljubica led to the spring being fitted with a dug well of carved wood. Serbian Wikipedia says that in 1858 Prince Miloš Obrenović placed the spring under state protection and decided to found a town there, and that locals and visitors named the spring after him in gratitude; the company’s account dates the renaming of the village of Vrbica as Aranđelovac to 1859. English Wikipedia notes that the brand bears the prince’s name. In 1866, the company says, the springs were tapped for the first time, and the older one was named “Prince Miloš” and the newer one “Prince Mihailo.”

A railway between Aranđelovac and Mladenovac, built in 1904, made the water easier to move, the company says. In 1907 the Pavilion of Prince Miloš, known locally as the “biveta,” went up over the oldest spring; the company describes it as the first building in Serbia made of reinforced concrete and the site of the first mineral-water bottling works at Bukovik. Exports began around this time, and Serbian Wikipedia says the water won awards at exhibitions in Brussels in 1906 and London in 1907. Between the two world wars, the company says, the spa and the bottling works were run by the savings bank of the Danube Banovina, and by 1935 about 3,000 bottles a day were filled and packed in heavy wooden crates of 36.

From hand bottling to Pepsi, Guarana and an owl.

Bottling stayed small for decades. Serbian Wikipedia says an installation for adding carbon dioxide to the water doubled capacity, so that in 1956 Serbia produced more than a million litres of mineral water in a year for the first time, sold in 0.5- and 0.3-litre bottles. Until 1964, it says, everything from washing to filling and capping was done by hand, the water went into one-litre bottles packed in straw-lined wooden crates and travelled to customers by rail; that year American-made equipment ended manual bottling. In 1965, according to both Serbian Wikipedia and the company, Knjaz Miloš became the first factory in Yugoslavia to make Pepsi-Cola under licence. A new automated plant outside the town followed three years later, and by 1972 the company says it was filling 600,000 litres a day and exporting to countries including the United States, Australia, Kuwait and Guinea. In 1973, then trading as Bukovička Banja, it had the largest annual mineral-water output in Yugoslavia, the company says. Serbian Wikipedia says production moved in 1988 from the spa itself to new halls in Aranđelovac’s southern industrial zone, at the foot of Mount Venčac, where the company is still based.

The range widened in the 1990s. In 1996 the company launched Guarana, which both Serbian Wikipedia and the company describe as the first energy drink on the domestic market, and in 1998 it introduced Aqua Viva, a still natural mineral water. Remix Knjaz, a sparkling drink with fruit juice, followed in 2013, alongside the Tube still drinks, Gusto juices and nectars, which Serbian Wikipedia says come only in glass, and Golf soft drinks. Since September 2022, the company says, it has also been the official producer and distributor of Pepsi’s carbonated soft drinks for Serbia and Montenegro.

The brand’s imagery leans on its setting. A Superbrands Serbia profile from the early 2010s says the picture on the Knjaz Miloš label is the Biveta, the pavilion in the Aranđelovac park that houses the spring, and that the water was served on the Orient Express in the 1930s. The same profile recalls two long-remembered television advertisements, a jump from a ferry and a friendly American trying to pronounce the name, and says Guarana’s owl mascot, which fans call “sovica,” starred in some of the first short animated commercials in the market. It says Aqua Viva came out of the flagship’s shadow in 2006, when its pack was redesigned and the change was presented by the tennis player Ana Ivanović, and that Aqua Viva moved to a lighter bottle with a redesigned label in 2012. Serbian Wikipedia says “Knjaz Miloš” became a generic name for sparkling water in Serbia, and the Superbrands profile says that in a Serbian kafana it is enough to ask for “knjaz.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Serbia: Jaffa, Takovo, Štark, Swisslion, Knjaz Miloš, Imlek and Zlatiborac. Serbian food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

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 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.

Funds, a Czech water house and a sole owner.

English Wikipedia says the company has operated in its current form since December 2000. Its ownership then changed several times in two decades. In September 2004, English Wikipedia says, citing the business site eKapija, FPP Balkan Limited, an investment fund belonging to the London-based FPP Group, bought a 25 per cent stake through a takeover bid, and a second bid that December took its holding to 58 per cent. In January 2005 FPP Balkan brought in the Salford investment fund as a partner, and in December 2006 the company gained ISO 22000 food-safety certification, which English Wikipedia says opened the European Union market to its products. In 2011 it marked two centuries under the motto “Two hundred years in our genes,” the company says.

In April 2015 the Danube Foods Group, which included Knjaz Miloš, the dairy Imlek and the biscuit maker Bambi, was acquired by the London fund Mid Europa Partners, as the company and the newspaper Blic both report. In June 2019 the Serbian daily Danas reported that a joint venture of the Czech water company Karlovarské minerální vody and PepsiCo would buy Knjaz Miloš from Mid Europa, and the Czech news site Novinky.cz reported the purchase that August. Karlovarské minerální vody has traded as Mattoni 1873 since 2019, and English Wikipedia says it has belonged to the Italian Pasquale family since 1994. In 2024, the company says, Mattoni 1873 bought PepsiCo’s minority stake of 46.43 per cent and became the sole owner of Knjaz Miloš. Its waters are bottled in Aranđelovac, at the plant in the southern industrial zone.

Two awards bear on the brand’s heritage. Serbian Wikipedia says that in 2017 the World Intellectual Property Organization recognised the company as the Serbian legal entity filing the most international trademark applications, and that in 2018 the company’s restoration of the Pavilion of Prince Miloš, the biveta in the Bukovička Banja park, received a European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award.

For a design guide, Knjaz Miloš shows how a water can build its identity on one place: a spa town, a prince’s name and a pavilion that became a label picture. Compare it with the Belgrade dairy Imlek, which shared its owners from 2015 to 2019, and with the Serbian soft-drink maker Jaffa Crvenka. For this guide we use a Bukovik blue, mineral white and prince red palette with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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