An Italian-food importer’s orange juice.

Granini began in Bielefeld, in eastern Westphalia, with Heinz Schürmann, an entrepreneur from Porta Westfalica. German Wikipedia dates the company to 1964 and says the production of juices, nectars and fruit drinks began in 1965. The brand’s own history gives 1965 as the year “a brand is born,” and the Bielefeld newspaper Neue Westfälische wrote in 2010 that Schürmann founded Granini in the year after he sold his first business in 1964. That first business was a metal-construction firm he had started in 1951 as Heinz Schürmann & Co., which grew into Schüco, the newspaper said.

The name looks south. Schürmann imported Italian food, and German Wikipedia says he coined Granini from the Italian word grano, grain, a nod to his trade in pasta. The company’s history says he wanted to bring the taste of “la dolce vita” to Germany, and that he called his orange juice granini Trinkfrucht.

Growth came quickly, and with it the need for capital. The Neue Westfälische reported that the juice maker was posting double-digit growth and that its founder had to lean on a strong backer. In 1967 Granini joined the Melitta group of Minden: the brand’s history describes it being taken in as a subsidiary to widen its distribution, while the newspaper’s obituary says it was sold. Under Melitta, German Wikipedia says, the ranges granini trinkGenuss, for fruit juices, and granini GuteErnte, for vegetable juices, were introduced.

The Neue Westfälische reported Schürmann’s death in February 2010, at the age of 87, calling him one of the region’s most prominent post-war entrepreneurs. It added that he had founded further small firms and had been the first to import the Spanish sparkling wine Freixenet into Germany.

The bottle with dimples.

Granini’s best-known piece of design is its bottle. The brand’s history dates it to 1969, when, it says, Granini created “a unique brand symbol” with a new and unusual bottle shape: transparent, and covered in small dimples. German Wikipedia calls it the brand’s typical Noppenflasche, a studded bottle, once made of glass and today mostly of PET plastic.

The move to plastic came in stages. The company says granini Trinkgenuss first appeared in a PET bottle in Switzerland in 2002 and reached Germany from 2004, and that the typical form of the bottle stayed unchanged. Alongside it the brand uses cartons and, in Germany, the returnable one-litre glass bottles of the German fruit-juice industry association, German Wikipedia says.

Sponsorship and television spread the name. The company says Granini was the official drinks supplier to the German national football team in 1974, the year the team won the World Cup at home, a link German Wikipedia also records, and that its first television commercials ran on Germany’s two largest channels in 1975. Austria became its first export market in the 1970s and Switzerland followed in 1978; Granini has been sold in Spain since 1986, and by the end of the 1980s, the company says, it was available in 16 countries.

The range widened under later owners. The company lists fruit spritzers from 1999, a velvety “samtig & fein” juice in 2011 and a first Granini lemonade, Die Limo, in 2013, and it marked the brand’s fiftieth year in 2015.

The wordmark changed recently. A Wikimedia Commons file sourced to an Eckes-Granini Deutschland flyer records the Granini logo as it stood in February 2025, and German Wikipedia captions the previous version as the logo used until 2024.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all milk, chocolate and fruit drink names: Milo, Nido, La Lechera, Cacaolat, Granini, Ting and Bigga. Milk, chocolate and fruit drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the taste or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks 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 Melitta to Nieder-Olm.

Granini’s second owner was Eckes, a family company from Nieder-Olm in Rhenish Hesse. English and German Wikipedia say Peter Eckes founded it in 1857 as a distillery working with wine by-products, that it moved into fruit juice in the 1920s, and that it launched hohes C, sold as Germany’s first ready-to-drink bottled orange juice, in 1958. In 1994 Eckes bought 74 percent of Granini from Melitta and merged the two as Eckes-Granini; at the end of 2006 Melitta sold its remaining 26 percent, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported, leaving the group as sole owner.

Eckes then made itself a juice company. German Wikipedia says it sold its German spirits business to Rotkäppchen-Mumm in 2006 and its international spirits arm to Oaktree Capital Management in 2007, while buying juice makers around Europe: Sió in Hungary in 1993, Les Vergers d’Alsace in France in 1998, Marli in Finland in 2001, Elmenhorster in Lithuania in 2006, Brämhults in Sweden in 2007, Pago of Austria from Brau Union at the end of 2012, and Rynkeby of Denmark from Arla in 2016. In 2018 it took 35 percent of the smoothie maker true fruits, Handelsblatt reported. The holding company, Eckes AG, has been in family hands since its founding, German Wikipedia says, and the group names production sites including Ringe in Denmark and Turku in Finland.

Granini is not made in one place. In Austria, German Wikipedia says, apple juice produced in Lower Austria by Eckes-Granini Austria is sold under the Original-Obi name, while in Switzerland, the newspaper Blick reported in 2024, Granini orange juice is produced by Nestlé Waters at Henniez. Granini fruit sweets are made by Katjes, German Wikipedia says. In May 2024 the Hamburg consumer advice centre gave Granini its monthly award for misleading packaging over the replacement of orange juice with an orange nectar in German shops; Eckes-Granini pointed to higher orange prices after poor harvests.

For a design guide, Granini shows how a single bottle shape can carry a brand for more than half a century, through a change of owner, a change of material and a change of logo. Compare Pago, its sister brand in the green bottle, and Rauch, the juice maker from Rankweil. For this guide we use orange, leaf green and clear-glass tones with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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