A distiller, a cherry liqueur and a family of deputies.

Teisseire’s history is a long one. English and French Wikipedia both date it to 1720, when Mathieu Teisseire, a distiller who had come to Grenoble from the Var, set up a distillery there making drinks from fruit and plants. The company says he was a liqueur maker and vinegar maker. His reputation rested on Ratafia de Teisseire, a cherry liqueur that, English Wikipedia says, made the family’s fortune. The Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova praised it in his memoirs, Histoire de ma vie, calling it, in English Wikipedia’s translation, “the divine liqueur of Grenoble,” made from cherry juice, eau de vie, sugar and cinnamon.

The business, on the Place Grenette in Grenoble, stayed in the family for several generations. French Wikipedia says Mathieu’s son, Mathieu II, ran it from 1769 to 1781, and that his son Camille Teisseire took over from 1781; the company gives the year of Camille’s arrival as 1789. For a time the firm traded as Veuve Teisseire & Fils. Camille was also a politician, a member of Grenoble’s city council during the Revolution and later deputy for Isère, and he married into the Perier family. When he took his seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1820 he handed the distillery to his eldest son, Charles, and the firm became Teisseire, Père & Fils.

By the second half of the nineteenth century the business was run by the Grenoble distillers Payraud & Ferrouillat, relatives of the family, who advertised themselves in 1883 as the “sole successors” of Teisseire, Père & Fils and warned customers against imitations of the ratafia. A Grenoble district still carries the Teisseire name, after the family.

From liqueur to syrup, from tube to bidon.

The modern brand dates from a change of owner. In 1907 the brand and distillery were bought by François Reynaud, a Grenoble absinthe distiller and merchant, English Wikipedia says; the company calls him a merchant in liqueurs and spirits. He began adding fruit syrups. From 1927 the family turned to drinks without alcohol: the company says his two sons launched alcohol-free syrups that year, made possible by pasteurisation, and French Wikipedia says his son Marcel ran the business. The distillery side was gradually left behind, and today the range is entirely non-alcoholic.

Packaging carried the brand into new places. French Wikipedia says sales to cafés, hotels and restaurants began in 1954, and in 1957 François Reynaud’s grandson, also called François, introduced concentrated syrups in aluminium tubes. In 1959 came the metal bidon, a light, unbreakable bottle that English Wikipedia says was modelled on the bidon racing cyclists use for water; the company says the idea came from the riders of the Tour de France and that the bidon opened the way into supermarkets. French Wikipedia calls Teisseire the inventor of syrup in a metal bidon. In 2002 the trade magazine Emballages Magazine ran a history of the brand’s bottle and pack designs from 1907 to 2001 under the headline “la révolution du bidon.” In 1994 the company launched its first shaped metal bidon, which it says won an Oscar de l’emballage, a French packaging award.

The Tour de France has stayed close to the brand. The company says Teisseire was among the first firms in the race’s advertising caravan, with its own publicity vans. French Wikipedia says Teisseire was a partner of the Tour from 2010 to 2013, handing its caravan place in 2014 to Fruit Shoot, a drink Britvic had launched in France under the Teisseire name in 2011. In 2026 the company was selling collector bidons for the Tour de France Femmes. In 2023, the company says, it adopted a new, more modern and colourful identity. Since 2025 its logo has carried the line “Part of Carlsberg Group,” French Wikipedia says, and its current slogan is “Ce petit quelque chose qui change tout” — the little something that changes everything.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from France and Mexico: Orangina, Vittel, Teisseire, Peñafiel, Boing!, Sidral Mundet and Tecate. French and Mexican 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 and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a can, a name and the moment of drinking it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its 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 drinks 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 drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Reynaud family to Britvic and Carlsberg.

The Reynaud family ran Teisseire for most of the twentieth century. French Wikipedia says François Reynaud’s grandson François led it from 1975, and his sons Dominique and then Eric followed. Production left Grenoble in 1971 for a new factory in nearby Crolles, which also became the head office. In 1993 Teisseire bought Moulin de Valdonne, a maker of fruit juices and syrups whose name it still uses, and in 1995 it bought Sironimo, a syrup brand that Pernod Ricard had founded in 1990, French Wikipedia says.

Family ownership ended in 2004, when Philippe Meunier’s Fruité bought Teisseire from the Reynaud family, Le Figaro reported in 2010. In May 2010 the British soft-drinks group Britvic agreed to buy Fruité, Teisseire included, Le Figaro and The Daily Telegraph reported; English Wikipedia says the French business was renamed Britvic Teisseire International. Britvic in turn was bought by the Danish brewer Carlsberg: the deal was announced in July 2024, cleared by the UK competition authority that December and approved by the High Court on 15 January 2025, BBC News reported, and Carlsberg merged its UK business with Britvic as Carlsberg Britvic.

Under its new owner Teisseire is leaving the Alps. On 16 October 2025 the company announced that it would close the Crolles factory, citing a very difficult economic and financial situation, and that production would stop around April 2026 and move to Slaur Sardet, a Le Havre maker of spirits and syrups, France 3 Normandie and BFM TV reported. Christophe Garcia, Teisseire’s president, said the move was unavoidable to secure the company’s future.

For a design guide, Teisseire shows how a pack can become the brand: a cyclist’s water bottle, turned into a syrup container in 1959, still carries a name that began with a cherry liqueur in 1720. Compare Orangina, the French citrus soda, and Andros, the French fruit company. For this guide we use a ratafia cherry, a grenadine red and a bidon silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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