A juice company’s move into milk and yoghurt.

Hollandia is the dairy brand of CHI Limited, the Lagos food and drinks company that also makes Chivita juices. The Coca-Cola Company said in 2019 that CHI was founded in Lagos in 1980. It began by making the German pouch drink Capri-Sonne under franchise in the early 1980s and launched its own juice, Chivita, in the mid-1990s, putting it into one-litre aseptic cartons from 1998, the company says. Today it trades as Chivita|Hollandia, a name that sets the dairy brand beside the juice.

Hollandia arrived in 2005. In the company’s words, that year it entered value-added dairy, “creating the Drinking Yoghurt category and launching Evaporated Milk in paper packaging under the Hollandia brand name.” Deepanjan Roy, then CHI’s managing director, gave more detail in a March 2021 interview with BusinessDay. He described Hollandia Yoghurt as Nigeria’s first long-shelf-life drinking yoghurt in aseptic packaging and listed Hollandia Evaporated Full Cream Milk among the products launched the same year, alongside a Chi Exotic pineapple and coconut juice.

CHI already had cartons in its factory when the brand arrived: Roy said that by 2009 the company was the largest Tetra Pak partner in sub-Saharan Africa, and CHI says it now runs the largest production site with aseptic beverage packaging in the region.

The range grew quickly. Roy dated Hollandia Soya Milk and Hollandia UHT Milk to 2006, and smaller 250ml packs to 2007 and 2008. The Coca-Cola Company, when it bought into CHI in 2016, described it as Nigeria’s leading dairy and juice company, and its 2019 release named Hollandia as the company’s value-added dairy brand.

Three yoghurts, four milks and many pack sizes.

Hollandia now has a website of its own, hollandiadairyng.com, and appears online as Hollandia Dairy. Its current range, as listed there, has four lines. Hollandia Yoghurt comes in Sweetened, Strawberry and Vanilla flavours, in packs that run from one litre down to 90ml; the brand describes it as a drinking yoghurt with a balance of sweet and sour and a smooth, velvety texture. Beside it sit Hollandia Evaporated Milk, Hollandia UHT Milk and Hollandia Lactose Free Milk. The website addresses its reader directly: “Whoever you are, whatever your taste, the Hollandia brand gives you choices to experience life to the fullest.”

The lactose-free milk was the brand’s most reported launch. Daily Trust reported on 28 November 2019 that CHI had unveiled Hollandia Lactose Free Easy-to-Digest Milk, which the company called Nigeria’s first ready-to-drink lactose-free milk. It came in a one-litre pack and was to be sold through CHI’s own Chi Shoppe outlets as well as supermarkets, department stores, neighbourhood kiosks and markets across Nigeria. The company’s timeline records the same launch as Nigeria’s first lactose-free milk.

Hollandia has also taken trade awards with its sister brand. The Nigerian Voice reported in 2013 that Chivita, Hollandia and other brands had won at the Generation Next Survey Awards, run with BusinessDay and HDI Youth Marketers, according to English Wikipedia. ThisDay, profiling the company in July 2013, listed Hollandia Yoghurt among CHI’s best-known brands, alongside Capri-Sonne, Happy Hour, Superbite and Beefie.

The brand was refreshed together with Chivita. The company’s timeline records a portfolio revitalisation of the Chivita and Hollandia brands in 2023, and the Hollandia website gives the shared Chivita|Hollandia name as its corporate owner.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Ghana, Ethiopia or Nigeria: Nkulenu, Kasapreko, Dashen, Star, Hollandia, Chivita and Gala. 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 roadside 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 meal or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory 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 Nigerian group to Coca-Cola to UAC.

Hollandia has had three owners in its 20 years, each by way of CHI. When it launched, CHI belonged to Tropical General Investments Group (TGI Group), which The Coca-Cola Company described in January 2016 as the holding company of Chi Ltd. That month Coca-Cola agreed to take an initial 40% stake and said it intended to own all of the company within three years, subject to regulatory approval.

On 30 January 2019 Coca-Cola announced that it had completed the purchase and now owned CHI outright. Its release described CHI as a leader in juices, value-added dairy and iced tea, and said Coca-Cola would support the Chi management team while using the scale of its system to take the company’s success into more African markets. Roy, in his 2021 interview with BusinessDay, dated the two steps to February 2016 and February 2019.

In 2025 the dairy brand changed hands again with the rest of the company. BusinessDay reported on 4 October 2025 that UAC of Nigeria Plc had agreed to buy CHI from Coca-Cola in a deal announced on 30 July 2025, and that Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission had approved it. TheCable reported on 3 October 2025 that UAC had completed the acquisition. UAC, which English Wikipedia says began in 1931 as Nigerian Motors, a subsidiary of Unilever’s United Africa Company, describes itself as a holding company whose businesses include packaged food and drinks.

CHI describes its Hollandia and Chivita products as locally made in Nigeria and says it holds ISO 22000 certification; its corporate office is in Ajao Estate, Lagos. The company says it has also been certified as a Great Place to Work since 2023.

For a design guide, Hollandia shows how a Lagos company used an aseptic carton to make drinking yoghurt and evaporated milk a shelf-stable everyday brand. Compare Chivita, the juice brand from the same company, and Vinamilk, the Vietnamese dairy. For this guide we use dairy blue, milk white and strawberry pink with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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