A temple son, Inner Mongolia and a drink launched on Tanabata.

Calpis was created by Kaiun Mishima (1878–1974), the son of a Buddhist temple priest from what is now Minoh, near Osaka. After studying at the Nishi Honganji seminary in Kyoto, now Ryukoku University, he left for Beijing in February 1902, the company says, and in 1903 set up a trading business there selling Japanese goods. His work took him into Inner Mongolia, and in July 1908, in the Keshikten Banner, he was offered the soured milk that the local nomads drank every day, according to the company’s chronology of his life. Wikipedia gives earlier dates for that first encounter: English Wikipedia places his Mongolian journey in 1902, Japanese Wikipedia in 1904.

Mishima returned to Japan in 1915 to build a business on what he had tasted. His first company, set up in Tokyo’s Ebisu district in 1917 as Lacto Co., tried three products — a cultured cream called Daigomi, a cultured skimmed milk called Daigoso and a caramel containing live lactic acid bacteria — and all three failed, Japanese Wikipedia says. Calpis grew out of the second: cultured skimmed milk, sweetened and sold as a concentrate to be diluted with water. It went on sale on 7 July 1919, the day of Tanabata, Japan’s Star Festival. In 1951, under a new Japanese ordinance on milk products, it became the first product in the country’s legal category of lactic acid bacteria drinks, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The name was chosen with care. It joins the “cal” of calcium to sarpis, a Sanskrit Buddhist term for a refined dairy product. Mishima weighed Calpir and Sarpis before consulting the composer Kosaku Yamada, who judged “Calpis” the best-sounding, Japanese Wikipedia says, citing the company. Abroad the drink is often sold as Calpico: in the United States, Britain and Indonesia the name is changed because of how “Calpis” sounds in English, the Japanese news site withnews reported in 2017.

Polka dots, first love and a poster contest.

Calpis packaging has used a polka-dot pattern since 1922. That April the company wrapped its economy-size bottle in paper printed with white dots on a blue ground, the first use of the pattern, according to the brand history published by Asahi Soft Drinks. The dots stand for the Milky Way, a nod to the Tanabata launch date, English and Japanese Wikipedia say. The colours were later reversed to blue dots on white; Japanese Wikipedia dates the switch to 1949, English Wikipedia to 1953. Before the dots, the first Calpis bottle was sold in a paper box printed with the Venus de Milo, Japanese Wikipedia says, and when the concentrate moved to a four-layer plastic bottle in April 2012, the so-called Peace Bottle, its design took the old polka-dot wrapping as its motif.

The same month, April 1922, a newspaper advertisement first used the line “the taste of first love” (hatsukoi no aji). The company says it was suggested by a younger schoolmate of Mishima’s from the seminary. When Mishima asked what he should tell a child who wanted to know what first love tastes like, the friend answered that it tastes of Calpis, because first love is pure and beautiful. The line divided opinion at first but spread quickly, the company says. Calpis also caught artists’ eyes: the painter Nakamura Tsune made a still life featuring the Calpis wrapping paper in the 1920s, now in the Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, and Japanese Wikipedia reproduces a 1926 Calpis poster designed by Hisui Sugiura.

In 1923 Mishima ran an international poster competition to help German commercial artists through the post-war inflation, the Asahi Soft Drinks history says; the entries were shown at the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo and elsewhere that December. From February 1924 Calpis advertising carried a mark based on a design by the German artist Otto Dünkelsbühler, which Wikipedia says placed third: a stylised Black man in a Panama hat drinking Calpis through a straw. In 1989 critics said the mark fostered discrimination, Japanese Wikipedia says, and in January 1990 the company stopped using it of its own accord because of the discrimination issue, according to the brand history.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are pantry, sauce, snack and cultured-drink names from Japan, China, South Korea and the United States: Yakult, Calpis, Kewpie, Lao Gan Ma, Huy Fong Foods, Ottogi and Pocky. Asian pantry and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to product names that belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood grocer to a supermarket shelf on another continent.

A pantry or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle, a jar, a box and the name printed on it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its product abroad 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.

From one concentrate to Asahi ownership.

The range grew slowly from the single concentrate. Concentrated orange Calpis arrived in 1958, the first television advertising in 1959 and pineapple and grape versions in 1961, according to the Asahi Soft Drinks history. Calpis Soda, diluted with carbonated water, went on sale around Tokyo in 1973 and nationwide in 1974; Japanese Wikipedia says carbonated water was used because the technology of the time could not keep a version diluted with still water in good condition for long. Ready-to-drink Calpis Water followed in February 1991 and became a major hit, and the concentrate moved from glass bottles into paper packs in 1995, Japanese Wikipedia says.

Ownership changed twice in two decades. Calpis had been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 1949. It formed a business tie-up with the French BSN group, now Danone, in 1987, and in August 1990 Ajinomoto became its largest shareholder by taking up a new share issue. On 1 October 2007 Ajinomoto made Calpis a wholly owned subsidiary. In May 2012 Ajinomoto agreed to sell all of its Calpis shares to Asahi Group Holdings, and the transfer took effect on 1 October 2012, Japanese Wikipedia says. In a reorganisation on 1 January 2016 the original company was merged into Asahi Soft Drinks, which took over the Calpis trademark and the marketing of the drinks; a new Calpis Co., a subsidiary of Asahi Soft Drinks, continued domestic drink manufacturing and the dairy business, and moved into the Asahi Breweries head-office building in Azumabashi, Sumida, Tokyo.

In Japan, Japanese Wikipedia lists two Calpis factories, in Okayama and Gunma prefectures; the Asahi Soft Drinks history dates them to 1968 and 1972 and records a new factory in Thailand starting operation in June 2014. Overseas business began with a company in Taiwan in 1966. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the guide site All About, says the decision to go abroad followed the drink’s popularity with athletes when it was supplied to the Olympic village at the 1964 Tokyo Games. A US office opened in Los Angeles in 1977, and Calpis reached its centenary on 7 July 2019, the Jiji Press news agency reported.

For a design guide, Calpis shows how a pattern chosen for a launch date — dots for the Milky Way — can outlast owners, bottles and a century of advertising. Compare Yakult, Japan’s other century-old cultured-milk drink, and Morinaga, the Tokyo confectioner behind the angel mark. For this guide we use a Milky Way blue, a milk white and a deep indigo with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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