Two Swiss immigrants and a valley outside Bogotá.

Alpina began in 1945 in the valley of Sopó, in the Colombian department of Cundinamarca, outside Bogotá. Its founders were two Swiss immigrants, Walter Goggel and Max Bazinger, as English Wikipedia and a 2021 company announcement give their names; the company’s own history page spells them Walter Göggel and Max Bänziger. Spanish Wikipedia, citing a 2015 Portafolio feature on the company’s 70th anniversary, says the two had come to Colombia to start a new life after fleeing the Second World War, and gives the founding date as 25 May 1945.

The company says the pair came looking for land suited to collecting milk, so that they could make cheese and butter by hand. English Wikipedia says they were struck by the Sopó valley’s likeness to the Swiss landscape. They began by buying 500 bottles of milk and making cheese from them by hand; Spanish Wikipedia gives the early business name as Lechera de Sopó and lists Emmental, Gruyère and Parmesan among its first cheeses. Alpina says it was the first company to bring aged cheeses of this kind to the Colombian market.

For about eight years the two men ran production, distribution and sales themselves, Spanish Wikipedia says; a bank loan then paid for land on which to build a factory. The company dates its first plant in Sopó to this early period, processing 3,000 litres of milk a day, along with its first vehicle for carrying products to Bogotá; Spanish Wikipedia puts the 3,000-litre figure at 1955. Beside the main plant stands La Cabaña Alpina, which the company says has been a stop since the 1950s for people driving out of Bogotá and for pilgrims visiting the nearby Santuario del Señor de la Piedra.

Kumis, arequipe and Bon Yurt.

From cheese and butter, Alpina widened into everyday dairy. Its history page lists a kumis-type fermented milk drink among its early products and describes it as an adaptation of old recipes and techniques for Colombian customers. Between 1980 and 2006, the period the company calls its years of “industrial innovation,” it moved beyond Colombia’s central highlands and introduced products it describes as firsts in the country: an industrially made arequipe, the milk caramel spread; a ready-to-eat gelatin dessert; and a petit-suisse-style fresh cheese. The same period, the company says, brought Bon Yurt, which it describes as a milk drink with cereals, the children’s brand Alpinito, and the adoption of UHT processing, which it says gives some products a shelf life of more than three months without refrigeration.

Later launches broadened the range. The company lists Soka, the Frutto fruit drinks and an Alpina Baby line, and, in the period it labels 2007 to 2014, the Yox fermented milk drink. Its current site groups its products into milks, yogurts and milk drinks, cheeses, arequipe, creams, butter, desserts, juices and snacks, and its cheese list runs from Parmesan and Emmental to a Queso Sopó, which the company says it launched as a tribute to the town that has seen it grow.

Abroad, Alpina says it entered Venezuela and Ecuador during its industrial period and began operating in the United States in 2011. In December 2021 it became a partner and shareholder in Clover Sonoma, the family-owned dairy of Petaluma, California, through a deal announced on Business Wire; the announcement said that Clover Sonoma’s chairman, Marcus Benedetti, would remain its single largest shareholder.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Colombia or Chile: Alpina, Zenú, Corona, Águila, Soprole, Colún and Watt’s. Colombian and Chilean food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname 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.

A medallion, a mountain and joined lettering.

Alpina’s mark has kept its Swiss references. Describing a brand refresh it dates from 2021, the company says it kept the elements of its logo — the medallion, the Matterhorn and its joined lettering — while making the logo simpler and more modern and able to appear in different colours. The same refresh, it says, carries “many colours” across all of its packaging. The slogan on its website is “Por un mundo delicioso,” for a delicious world.

The company is still based in Sopó, where its corporate building stands on the road to Briceño. Its legal name, Alpina Productos Alimenticios S.A.S. BIC, carries Colombia’s designation for benefit and collective-interest companies, and English Wikipedia describes it as a benefit corporation. In the 2021 announcement it described itself as a family-owned food company of Swiss origin and said that a third group of Colombian families had become partners in the business during the 1970s. Its chief executive is Ernesto Fajardo, Spanish Wikipedia says, citing Portafolio in December 2023. Spanish Wikipedia names Colombian plants in Sopó, Facatativá, Entre Ríos and Chinchiná and calls the Sopó plant the largest. The company also set up the Fundación Alpina, which Spanish Wikipedia dates to 2008. The Colombian dairy is unrelated to Alpina, the German car maker, and to Alpinestars, the Italian motorcycle-clothing company.

For a design guide, Alpina shows how a Swiss mountain and a joined script can carry a Colombian dairy through eight decades. Compare Soprole, the Chilean dairy, and Vinamilk, the Vietnamese dairy. For this guide we use a Matterhorn blue, a pasture green and a milk white with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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