A father’s yogurt, a son’s name and a wartime move to New York.

Dannon is the American yogurt brand of the French food group Danone. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1996) dates the American company to 1942, when it was incorporated as Dannon Milk Products, Inc., and it traces the name back to a yogurt business that had begun in Spain more than two decades earlier.

That directory says Isaac Carasso, a Spanish businessman, began making yogurt in Barcelona in 1919 for sale through pharmacies, using cultures he obtained from Bulgaria and from the Pasteur Institute. As the business grew he set up a French branch in the 1920s, run by his son Daniel, after whom the product was named Danone. English Wikipedia says the name came from a Catalan nickname for the young Daniel.

The American chapter began during the Second World War. English Wikipedia says the occupation of France forced Daniel Carasso to take refuge in the United States in 1942. The directory says he arrived that year with Joe Metzger, a Swiss-born Spanish businessman, and Metzger’s son Juan, and that together they bought a small yogurt factory in New York City and carried on production with the family formula.

The name changed on the way. Danone became Dannon. English Wikipedia says the spelling was Americanized on the advice of Raymond Loewy so that the brand would not be mispronounced, while the New York site 6sqft, writing on 14 November 2017, says Carasso made the change so that the brand would sound more American.

Its early home was in the Bronx. 6sqft says the company at first meant to sell only plain, unsweetened yogurt, and that in its early years the cups were delivered to cafeterias and pharmacies in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. The directory describes the early product as sold in half-pint glass jars, and it quotes Juan Metzger, in a 1980 People interview, recalling that he washed out the returnable jars himself every day.

A layer of fruit, a move to Queens and two changes of owner.

The change that widened Dannon’s market was a layer of fruit. The directory says that around 1950 Dannon added strawberry preserves to the bottom of the container; 6sqft dates the move to 1947 and says the fruit went to the bottom, rather than the top, to satisfy the dairy rules of the time. The directory says the company slogan changed with it, to “A wonderful snack … a delicious dessert,” and that a low-fat yogurt followed later. Over the same years, it says, waxed cups replaced the glass jars.

Growth took the business out of the borough. The directory says Dannon moved from the Bronx in 1952 to a larger facility in Long Island City, Queens. Daniel Carasso had returned to Europe in 1948, it says; Joe Metzger became president of Dannon Milk Products in 1952 and chairman in 1959, when Juan Metzger became president.

The family company then changed hands twice. The directory says that in 1959 Dannon was acquired by the Chicago-based Beatrice Foods Co. In 1981 it was bought from Beatrice by BSN-Gervais-Danone, the Paris company that had grown partly out of the original Carasso venture, and the directory quotes a BSN spokesman telling Advertising Age that the purchase was a way to buy back “the name we own around the world.” English Wikipedia says the French group adopted the name of its flagship dairy brand, Danone, in 1994. Danone has owned Dannon since 1981.

The American head office moved several times. The directory says it went from New York City to White Plains in the 1980s and to Tarrytown in 1994, and that by the mid-1990s Dannon made its yogurt at two plants, in Minster, Ohio, and Fort Worth, Texas, with its research centre at Minster.

The wider American business was later reorganised. English Wikipedia says Danone completed its purchase of WhiteWave Foods, which then owned Horizon Organic, in April 2017; the combined business was named DanoneWave and, in April 2018, renamed Danone North America, which Wikipedia places in White Plains, New York.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American yogurt names. Yogurt reaches people through a cup more than through any other object: a small tub of plastic or, less often, glass, kept cold from the dairy to the store and sealed with a foil or film lid under a snap-on cap. Single cups sit side by side in a chilled case, larger tubs sit on the shelf below, and multipacks are held together by a cardboard sleeve or a band, so a brand has to read clearly from a short distance and at a glance.

Because one spoonful of plain yogurt looks much like another, much of a yogurt brand’s identity is carried by the cup itself: its shape, the colour of the lid, the band of type around the side and the picture of fruit or flavour on the foil. The questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where the yogurt is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Samples, a sky banner, a body slogan and a line of animals.

Dannon’s identity has been shaped as much by advertising as by packaging. The directory says the founders hired an advertising firm early on and handed out samples in restaurants, airports and other places where international travellers gathered. As the brand broadened, it says, Dannon added rock ’n’ roll shows to its radio outlets, gave schoolchildren “Go Yogurt” buttons, and flew an airplane streamer over the crowds at Brooklyn’s Coney Island reading “Yannon Dogurt — oops / Dannon Yogurt.”

Later campaigns spoke to adults and then to children. The directory says that for three years before 1985 Dannon’s advertisements urged the public to “Get a Dannon body,” and that in 1984 and 1985 the company brought out Dannon Extra Smooth, a French-style blended yogurt, and the dessert-style Dannon Supreme. Minipacks followed in 1985. In 1992 Dannon began test-marketing Sprinkl’ins, a children’s yogurt whose package was printed inside with games and puzzles, and in 1994 it introduced Dannon Danimals, a line decorated with pictures of wild elephants and bears.

The directory names Grey Advertising as Dannon’s agency in those years and dates its campaign “Taste Why It’s Dannon” to July 1994. One of its spots, the directory says, showed a dessert cart of rich treats turning into their Dannon Light counterparts.

Across all of this, the name itself has carried the story. 6sqft notes that the brand is still known as Danone in Europe.

For a design guide, Dannon shows how an imported name can be respelled for a new market while keeping its founder’s son inside it, and how a brand can talk through buttons, sky banners and slogans as much as through its cup. Compare it with evian, another Danone brand, and Oikos, the Greek yogurt line launched under the Dannon name in 2011. For this guide we use Bronx blue, strawberry red, waxed-cup cream and deep navy with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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