A settlement dairy, an ice-lolly factory and a name.

Bright Dairy — in Chinese 光明乳业, Guangming meaning “bright” — is one of the oldest names in Chinese milk, and its history runs through several Shanghai companies. Chinese Wikipedia, citing local histories and The Paper, traces the earliest of them to the Culty Dairy Company, set up in Shanghai by a Frenchman around the turn of the twentieth century, when dairy cows were first brought to the city from Europe. In 1911 the dairy passed to an Englishman named Keylock, who kept its name; in 1914 he bought land on Avenue Joffre, now Huaihai Road, for new milking sheds; in 1925 it received one of the first “A” licences issued by the Shanghai Municipal Council; and in 1930 it brought in milking machines. The Culty site later became a farm and then the No.2 dairy plant of the Shanghai Milk Company; the plant moved to Wuzhong Road in 1992, and the old site was used for the new Shanghai Library from 1993, The Paper reported.

The brand name came from a second company. The Shanghai Yimin No.1 Food Factory was founded in 1949, and in 1952 its deputy director, Jiang Zemin — later China’s leader — proposed that the factory’s cold drinks be sold under the name Guangming, according to a 2014 report by the Shanghai news site Eastday. Yimin No.1 put the name on its salt-water ice lollies, and its sister factory Yimin No.3 on milk powder.

On 23 January 1956, under the joint public–private ownership schemes of the time, the Culty dairy, Yimin No.1 and the Guangming brand were all placed in a new Shanghai Milk Company, the date Chinese Wikipedia gives for the company’s founding. For about twenty years from 1958, the company says, it made mainly milk powder because fresh supplies were short.

A joint venture, a listing and a partner.

The modern company dates from 1996, when the Shanghai Milk Company and Shanghai Industrial Holdings each put up half the capital for Shanghai Bright Dairy Co., Ltd., Chinese Wikipedia says, citing the company’s history. In 2000 it became a joint-stock company, with the French food group Danone among its founding shareholders; in 2002 it listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange; and in 2003 it took its present name, Bright Dairy & Food Co., Ltd. Chinese Wikipedia says it was China’s largest dairy company by sales until 2003 and now ranks third, behind the Inner Mongolian firms Yili and Mengniu.

The Danone partnership shaped its southern business. Danone took a stake in Bright in 2000 and transferred its Shanghai yoghurt companies and Guangzhou Danone to it; in January 2003 Bright announced a new Guangzhou dairy and full ownership of the Guangzhou yoghurt business, which kept selling Danone-branded yoghurt. The two ended that trademark arrangement at the end of 2007, and the last Danone-branded yoghurt left the Guangzhou plant on 31 December 2007, the Guangzhou Daily reported in January 2008; Bright replaced it with its own Changyou and Jianneng yoghurts.

The owner above it changed too. In 2006 Shanghai merged several state food businesses, including Yimin No.1 — which English Wikipedia calls the holder of the Bright brand — into Bright Food (Group), which is owned by the Shanghai municipal government and holds a little over half of Bright Dairy. The group’s other names include White Rabbit milk candy. In December 2018 Bright Dairy bought Yimin No.1 outright, bringing the Guangming ice-cream factory back under the dairy, Kankan News reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make dairy products or drinks, and all of them come from China: Yili, Mengniu, Bright Dairy, Nongfu Spring, Wong Lo Kat, JDB and Tsingtao. Chinese dairy, water, herbal-tea and beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names with long local histories to companies that now belong to much larger groups or answer to many shareholders, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drinks or dairy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the everyday habit it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, added new plants or grown far beyond the city 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.

Farms, factories, a doorstep round and a New Zealand arm.

Bright Dairy makes and sells chilled fresh milk, yoghurt, long-life milk, cheese, milk powder and ice cream, the last mainly under the “Guangming” brand, Chinese Wikipedia says. Among its better-known lines are the Youbei fresh milks, the long-life Mosilian yoghurt and the chilled Jianneng and Changyou yoghurts. In Shanghai it also runs a home-delivery service for milk.

The company describes its supply chain on its website as 28 dairy farms, 17 processing plants and 65 logistics centres. Its herds were reorganised in 2014, when its Holstein farming business took in the Singapore investment firm RRJ Capital as a partner, and in 2015 it bought the dairy-farm assets of the Shanghai Milk Group, Jiemian reported. Abroad, Bright Dairy announced an investment in the New Zealand milk processor Synlait in 2010, the New Zealand Herald reported, and Chinese Wikipedia lists Synlait as its overseas subsidiary.

Newer ventures have kept the name in view. In 2019 it started a bakery chain, 光明悠焙, China Economic Net reported in 2020, and in May 2021 it became the first food company to receive the Shanghai Mayor’s Quality Award, an honour set up in 2008, the same outlet reported. In 2018 a Shanghai intellectual-property court ruled on appeal that its use of “85°C” on milk cartons, describing a pasteurising temperature, did not infringe a bakery chain’s trademark, The Paper reported.

For a design guide, Bright Dairy shows how a single word — Guangming, “bright” — given to a factory’s ice lollies in 1952 could carry a city’s milk, yoghurt and ice cream for more than seventy years. Compare White Rabbit, its sister brand in the Bright Food group, and Yili, the Inner Mongolian dairy now ahead of it. For this guide we use a bright blue, a deep blue, milk white and a red with a clean sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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