A Valencian pharmacist, his citrus syrups and a drink without bubbles.

Trina began in a pharmacist’s laboratory in Valencia. Its creator, Agustín Trigo, was born in the city in 1863, qualified in pharmacy in Barcelona in 1888 and took his doctorate in Madrid, Cinco Días reported in a 2016 history of the brand. He founded the Laboratorio del Doctor Trigo on Valencia’s calle Sagunto in 1896; its first success was a fruit salt made with extracts of local oranges and lemons, and the laboratory went on to specialise in orange and lemon essences and syrups. Trigo was also briefly mayor of Valencia, from April to October 1931, for the Partido de Unión Republicana Autonomista, the same paper said.

The drink’s dates are told in two ways. The brand’s website says Trina was the first non-carbonated fruit drink on the Spanish market, born in Valencia in 1933 under the name TriNaranjus. Cinco Días dates the laboratory’s orange-juice drink to 1933 but places the still TriNaranjus in the 1940s, when the Valencian businessman Salvador Soler Violant went into partnership with Trigo to make a version of their orange drink without gas.

The name has more than one explanation. Cinco Días wrote that the “Tri” may come from Trigo’s surname, from the three oranges that advertising said went into every bottle and that appeared at the base of its glass bottle, or from the three kinds of orange used. Spanish Wikipedia, citing Ouest-France in 2018, names those varieties as Valencia, Salustiana and Cadenera, and says the first bottle was shaped like an orange, with a label showing three pieces of fruit.

Trigo died in 1952, Cinco Días reported, and Soler took charge of the company. TriNaranjus became a national success from the 1950s, as soft drinks spread across Spain.

Naranjina, Orangina and a French connection.

Trina shares an origin with one of France’s best-known soft drinks. According to English Wikipedia, citing the brand’s own heritage page and The New York Times, Trigo presented an orange drink called Naranjina at the Marseille trade fair in 1935, where he met Léon Beton, a French businessman living in Algeria; Beton bought the formula, and it became Orangina. Cinco Días dates that fair to 1936. Spanish Wikipedia, citing a 2005 article by Thierry Lefebvre in the Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, says Beton bought the formula and the name in 1936 to produce the drink in France.

The two drinks then went separate ways. Orangina kept its bubbles and grew in France under Beton’s son, Jean-Claude, while TriNaranjus grew in Spain without them. Cinco Días noted in 2016 that the two brands had ended up inside the same company, each aimed at its own market: Trina in Spain, Orangina elsewhere.

The still drink’s identity was built on that difference. Under Soler, Cinco Días reported, the company invested heavily in advertising and was one of the first brands to appear on Televisión Española, with messages that always stressed that the drink was natural and free of bubbles, unlike its main competitors.

The modern name came later. Cinco Días says that when Cadbury Schweppes bought the brand in 1989 it shortened the name to Trina; Spanish Wikipedia dates the change of image and name to 1986. The brand still writes its name both as Trina and with two capitals, TriNa.

Spanish Wikipedia lists the range as orange, lemon, apple and tropical, with a Zero line of orange, lemon and apple; tea and coladas have come and gone.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all soft drink and water names from Spain and Italy: La Casera, Trina, Font Vella, Bezoya, Aquarius, Lemonsoda and Levissima. Spanish and Italian soft drink and water 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 bar to a supermarket shelf.

A soft drink or water brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its bottling 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 bottled.

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 Cadbury Schweppes to Suntory.

Trina’s ownership since the late 1980s follows the British group that bought it. Cinco Días reported that Cadbury Schweppes acquired the brand in 1989 and made it its reference brand in Spain. In 2001 the same group bought the Madrid gaseosa maker La Casera, Cinco Días reported that July, so that both brands sat in its Spanish drinks business.

In November 2005 Cadbury Schweppes agreed to sell its continental European drinks business — named by El País as including La Casera and Trina — to the investment firms Lion Capital and Blackstone. That business later traded as Orangina Schweppes, bringing Trina and the Orangina it had parted from in the 1930s under one roof. In November 2009 Japan’s Suntory completed its purchase of Orangina Schweppes, and with it Trina, the Spanish trade journal Alimarket reported. Its Spanish arm, Schweppes Suntory España, was renamed Suntory Beverage & Food Spain in September 2020, Financial Food reported.

Today the brand describes itself as a Spanish brand of still soft drinks, made with fruit juice as a base; its website footer links to the Schweppes Suntory group. Spanish Wikipedia says the drink is sold in Spain and Portugal, in bars and restaurants as well as supermarkets. The brand’s website keeps the founding story at the front, calling Trina the first fruit soft drink without bubbles on the Spanish market and naming its first name, TriNaranjus. Trigo and his drink have been the subject of features in Cinco Días and ABC in 2016 and on the radio network Cadena SER in 2024, according to Spanish Wikipedia.

Trina is not to be confused with the Chinese solar-panel maker Trina Solar or with the American rapper who performs as Trina; the drink brand’s website is trina.com.

For a design guide, Trina shows how a long name can be shortened while keeping its first syllable and its founding story. Compare La Casera, the Madrid gaseosa with the same owners, and Compal, the Portuguese fruit-drink brand. For this guide we use orange, leaf green and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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