Two brothers, a bakery shop and an Italian-sounding name.

Carletti is an Aarhus company. It says it began in 1918 as Brdr. Jakobsen, a wholesaler of chocolate and sweets set up by the brothers Henry Peder Jakobsen and Niels Carl Jakobsen in their parents’ bakery shop on Hjortensgade in Aarhus. The business moved to Mejlgade in 1920 and to Eckersbergsgade in 1935, the company says, and in those years it brought out two products it still counts among its early classics: Romstænger, rum-flavoured sticks, in 1935, and Big Ben caramels in 1939.

The name came later. In 1943 Brdr. Jakobsen started making its own chocolate and sweets, and it put them out under the name Carletti. The company explains the choice as a tribute to Niels Carl Jakobsen, one of the two founding brothers: Carletti, it says, means “little Carl” in Italian. The Italian-sounding name on a Danish sweet is therefore a family name in disguise. The same word is also an Italian surname, which is why the Danish confectioner shares its name with musicians, footballers and a Florentine merchant-explorer.

The business stayed in the Jakobsen family for three generations. In 1955 it passed to the second generation, the sons Henry and K-D. Jakobsen, the company says. In 1960 it bought land at Skødstrup, outside Aarhus, and in 1963 it moved into a new factory there of three halls and 12,000 square metres, selling the Eckersbergsgade site. Skødstrup is still the headquarters: Danish Wikipedia places the company there, in Aarhus municipality, and the company’s own pages name it as the site of its main factory.

Skumbananer, P-tærter and a bear in bronze.

Carletti’s best-known products date from 1953, when, the company says, it launched Skumbananer, its foam bananas, and P-tærter. Danish Wikipedia names the same two products as what the company is known for, and the company calls them among the most popular classic sweets in Denmark. They have been repackaged rather than replaced: in 1989 P-tærter also went into bags, in a smaller size than the 1953 original, with the new pack advertised on TV 2, and in 1990 the foam bananas followed in bags too. In 2003 the pair turned fifty, which the company marked with a party for all employees and a visit from the comedian Lars Hjortshøj, and in 2013 they turned sixty.

The range grew around them. The company’s own timeline lists the original Brazil in 1958, liquorice sticks in 1959, Maritza and Cremebrud in 1965, Kæmpepladen in 1970 together with a fruit-and-apricot konfekt better known by the nickname “flæsk,” and the Bridge Blanding mix in 1975. Later additions include the K-tærte, which it calls the P-tærte’s little sister, in 2007; Carletti pålægschokolade, the thin chocolate for bread, including organic and Fairtrade-labelled versions, in 2008; a round version of it in 2013; and P-tærter with caramel in 2016.

Two moments in the timeline belong to the company’s visual history. For its fiftieth anniversary in 1968, Carletti commissioned a work from the Danish sculptor Mogens Bøggild. It ordered a leaping stag in bronze, the company says, but the result was a bear, which still stands outside the Skødstrup factory. And in 2007 Carletti took a new logo, which it describes as rounder and softer in expression than the one before. The company offers its logo for download in Pantone, CMYK and RGB versions but publishes no colour values in text.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Denmark or Sweden: Tuborg, Faxe Kondi, Cocio, Harboe, Carletti, Festis and Loka. Danish and Swedish 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 groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a kiosk 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 taste or occasion it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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.

From a family firm to a foundation-owned group.

Carletti expanded abroad before it changed hands. It set up a factory in Poland in 1996 and bought Dansk Chokoladefabrik in 2001, the company says. In 2006, after three generations of the Jakobsen family, it became part of Givesco, a Danish group based in Vejle. Danish Wikipedia says Givesco was founded in 1980 by Jens Eskildsen and Mary Antonie Eskildsen and is owned by a memorial foundation in their names; Givesco describes itself as a foundation-owned group with divisions for food, cakes and dessert, confectionery and investment, while Carletti describes its owner as the family-owned Givesco group. Carletti says it is wholly owned by Givesco.

Under Givesco, Carletti has bought older Danish sweet makers. In 2014, the company says, it bought Støvring Bolcher in the spring and, in the autumn, the Evers trademark, known for Flødetabletter and Schweizerdrops. In 2017 it bought Heede Bolcher in Vejle and held the topping-out ceremony for a new factory at Skødstrup in June. It celebrated its centenary in 2018, expanded the factories at Skødstrup and in Poland in 2020, and in 2021 bought the Finnish food group Makua Foods, with the liquorice factory Makulaku Lakritsa and the sales company Impuls Tukku.

Today the group consists of the parent company Carletti A/S, with its factory and headquarters at Skødstrup, a factory unit in Vejle, Carletti Polska in Poland and the Finnish companies, the company says. It sells chocolate and sweets through shops mainly in Denmark and Northern Europe, makes goods for other brands and private labels, and sells dragée products to other food companies for use in cakes, ice cream and dairy products. It says all its production sites hold IFS and/or BRCGS certification.

For a design guide, Carletti shows how a borrowed Italian nickname, a pair of 1953 sweets and a softened 2007 logo can keep a century-old family firm recognisable after it joins a larger group. Compare Anthon Berg, the Copenhagen marzipan and chocolate maker, and Cloetta, which began in Copenhagen. For this guide we use cocoa brown, foam-banana yellow and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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