A Karlovy Vary merchant and a spring named after a king.

Mattoni is named after a man, but the water is older than the brand. The company dates the first written mention of the spring at Kyselka, a small spa village near Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia, to 1522, and says that by 1793 its water was being exported in stoneware jugs. In 1852 King Otto I of Greece visited, and the main spring has carried his name ever since: Ottův pramen, the Otto spring. Under its German name, Giesshübl, the village was then a modest spa run by the von Neuberg family.

Heinrich Mattoni came from a family of Italian origin that had been in Karlovy Vary since the 1690s; the company says its first member there, Ottavio Mattoni, was a lemon merchant. Czech Wikipedia says Heinrich worked for years as a book-keeper and travelling salesman for export firms in Vienna and Hamburg before coming home, and in 1856 leased the struggling dispatch of Karlovy Vary’s own mineral water, in partnership with Friedrich Knoll, whose sister he married; the firm traded as Knoll-Mattoni until 1873. In 1867 he took the lease on the export of the Kyselka water, the company and Czech Wikipedia say. In 1870 he was named a supplier of mineral water to the imperial court in Vienna.

The company dates its own founding to 1873, the number it now carries in its name. That year, the company says, Mattoni bought the whole of Kyselka from Count Černín and set about building a spa and the village’s infrastructure. He paid for a railway line from Vojkovice to Kyselka, which the company dates to 1894 and Czech Wikipedia says opened in 1895, and in 1889 the emperor raised him to the nobility. In 1906, the company says, the business became a joint-stock company, Heinrich Mattoni AG. Plzeňský Deník reported in 2011 that by the 1880s Mattoni was among the best-known brands in Europe and that in 1910 ten million bottles were exported.

Glass bottles, a red eagle and a Pininfarina bottle.

The brand’s look began with a change of material. Czech Wikipedia, drawing on a chronicle kept by Heinrich’s son Leo von Mattoni, says that in 1867 Mattoni began trial bottling in glass, where the water had been sold in earthenware, and switched to glass entirely in 1873. The first bottles carried only moulded lettering, “Giesshübler Sauerbrunn” and then, from 1873, “Mattoni Giesshübler Sauerbrunn.” The company dates the arrival of glass bottles with a paper label to 1874.

The symbol on that label was a red eagle, which the company says came from the Mattoni family coat of arms. Czech Wikipedia says a label with the eagle was in use by the middle of 1873 and that the drawing was revised in 1874; on the first version, the eagle was tearing a sash bearing Heinrich Mattoni’s name. Bottles bound for overseas markets were reinforced with wire, the company says. The eagle has stayed on the label ever since, and in 2005 the brand supported a programme to bring golden eagles back to the Czech Republic.

Mattoni also advertised early and loudly. Czech Wikipedia says he was among the first to use press advertising on a large scale, and that at the Jubilee Exhibition in Prague in 1891 a balloon advertising the water came down on a factory chimney in Holešovice, drawing wide public attention. The company says the water won a Grand Prix at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris.

The modern bottle has an Italian designer. In 2004, the company says, the Italian studio Pininfarina, known for its Ferrari car designs, created a new Mattoni bottle. In 1999 the brand added a line of flavoured sparkling waters, starting with lemon and orange, and it has long tied itself to public events: the company says Mattoni became the official water of the Prague International Marathon in 1995 and general partner of the Český slavík music poll in 1996.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from the Czech Republic or Slovakia: Opavia, Budvar, Kozel, Mattoni, Horalky, Figaro and Zlatý Bažant. Czech and Slovak food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still belong to the town or company where they began to names that now belong to much larger international 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 pack, a name and the taste or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved production or grown far beyond the place 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.

Nationalisation, the Pasquale family and Mattoni 1873.

Heinrich Mattoni’s golden age did not survive him long. The company says the First World War, the economic crisis and the Second World War ended the spa’s heyday, and in 1945 the water business was nationalised and placed under the state enterprise Západočeská zřídla, based in Karlovy Vary. After 1989 the enterprise became Karlovarské minerální vody, while spa care in Kyselka came to an end, the company says.

In 1994 the company was privatised and passed to the Italian business family Pasquale, the Czech news agency ČTK reported in 2019; the company presents this as a return to the brand’s Czech-Italian roots and says Antonio Pasquale rebuilt the business from the Mattoni plant in Kyselka. Alessandro Pasquale is now its general manager. In 2019 Karlovarské minerální vody renamed itself Mattoni 1873, making the founding year part of the group’s name, and in 2023 the brand celebrated its 150th anniversary.

The group has grown well beyond one spring. It bought Austria’s Waldquelle in 2008, Hospodářské noviny reported, and Hungary’s Szentkirályi in 2015, E15 reported; in 2019 it bought Serbia’s Knjaz Miloš together with PepsiCo, Novinky.cz reported. Since 2018 it has bottled and distributed PepsiCo drinks in the Czech Republic and other markets, iDNES.cz reported, and the company now lists PepsiCo snacks such as Lay’s among its brands. Forbes Czech edition called it the largest soft-drink producer in Central Europe in 2022, which the company also says of itself. Czech Wikipedia names the plants at Kyselka and at Mnichov, in the Cheb district, as the main sources of its mineral waters.

For a design guide, Mattoni shows how a family emblem, a red eagle first printed on a paper label in the 1870s, can carry a mineral water through an empire, nationalisation and private ownership again. Compare Kozel, another Czech drinks brand built around an animal, and Lay’s, one of the PepsiCo brands Mattoni 1873 now distributes. For this guide we use an eagle red, a spring blue and a pale glass tone with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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