A wartime factory in an old distillery outside Kalisz.

Winiary takes its name from a place, not a person. Winiary was a village on the edge of Kalisz, in western Poland, and is now a district of the city. The factory that made the name famous was founded there in 1941, during the German occupation, by Alfred Nowacki, a businessman of German citizenship and Polish background.

According to a 2019 history in the Kalisz edition of Nasze Miasto, Nowacki moved to Kalisz in 1940 and on 27 February 1941 bought a property in Winiary — called Weinbergen by the occupiers — with an old distillery and a villa. Within a few months a factory there was producing soups, kisiel and seasonings. Polish Wikipedia says production began in October 1941, in a disused brewery and distillery, under the name Nährmittelfabrik Alfred Nowacki, and that it was geared to supplying the German army with vegetable concentrates, dried vegetables and soups.

The factory had a second life. Polish and English Wikipedia both describe it as an outpost of the Home Army, the Polish underground, with Nowacki giving work to underground associates; Nasze Miasto says he passed information to Polish intelligence and helped fund its agents and couriers, and that he built a canteen and a works dental surgery for his staff, most of them Poles at risk of deportation for forced labour in Germany. He was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 March 1944. On 19 January 1945 the Germans shot him with 56 Home Army soldiers in the Skarszew forest near Kalisz, the paper reported, days before the city changed hands.

A state works, and a mayonnaise in 1974.

The Germans left the factory on 22 January 1945, Polish Wikipedia says, and its workers restarted production in February. Under the nationalisation laws of 1946 it passed to the state, becoming the Państwowe Zakłady Żywnościowe „Winiary”, then Zakłady Żywnościowe „Winiary” in 1950. Its later name, Kaliskie Zakłady Koncentratów Spożywczych „Winiary” — the Kalisz food-concentrates works — dates from 1960 according to Polish Wikipedia and from 1976 according to Nestlé Polska. Through every change of name, Polish Wikipedia notes, the “Winiary” mark stayed the same.

The range grew with the works. After the war it made dried vegetables, liquid soup seasoning, powdered soups and bouillon cubes, then added sauces, puddings, kisiel and drinks; dinner and tomato concentrates followed in the 1960s. Polish Wikipedia puts a period of rapid building from 1970, with new production halls, packing machines and freeze-drying.

In 1974 the factory began making Majonez Dekoracyjny, its “decorative mayonnaise,” which became its best-known product. Polish Wikipedia lists a run of awards for it in the late 1990s, among them a “Teraz Polska” distinction in May 1998, and English Wikipedia records further awards in 2002–03. In the 1980s the works also made crisps, sparkling water, pâtés, sandwich spreads and canned meals, and in 1986 opened a new drying plant; in the 1990s it added lower-fat mayonnaise and pasta.

Staff numbers tell the same story of growth: about 300 in 1946 and about 1,400 in 1974, Polish Wikipedia says, rising to about 1,600 by 1996. In September 1994 Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the works and Kraft Jacobs Suchard Polska had started a coffee-packing line in Kalisz.

Polish food and drink brands.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Poland: Goplana, Mlekovita, Łowicz, Krakus, Żywiec, Kubuś and Winiary. Polish food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from cooperatives and family firms to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner 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 meal or moment 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.

From state works to a Nestlé branch.

Privatisation came in stages. On 1 September 1994 the works became a joint-stock company wholly owned by the State Treasury, Polish Wikipedia says; a plan for the staff to buy it themselves did not go ahead, and the press reported eleven interested buyers. Its president was Karol Mądrowski, director of the factory since 1979, who stayed on under Nestlé until he retired in 2007. In July 1995, Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza reported the sale: Nestlé took 45 per cent of the shares and Bank Handlowy 10 per cent, with the state keeping 45 per cent. Nestlé bought out the bank in June 1998 and later bought shares from the state; by 2000 it held 97.7 per cent. At the start of 2001 Winiary S.A. became a branch of Nestlé Polska S.A., keeping the Winiary name as a brand.

The brand is still made where it began. Nestlé Polska says its Kalisz branch, the Winiary factory, has five production departments — bouillons and liquid seasonings; soups, sauces and ready meals; desserts and porridges; mayonnaises and cold sauces; and infant nutrition — and employs about 900 people. Polish Wikipedia puts the range at more than 650 products, from mayonnaise and dressings to soups, sauces, puddings, jellies and kisiel, and records that Winiary was named a Superbrand in Poland in 2012, for the fourth time. The brand’s own website today is largely a recipe and product catalogue, with Majonez Dekoracyjny given a section of its own.

For a design guide, Winiary shows how a brand named after a suburb can outlast war, nationalisation and a foreign owner while keeping the same name. Compare Maggi, another Nestlé brand, and Knorr, another soup and bouillon name. For this guide we use a deep red, cream and a parsley green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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