A Latvian couple’s kitchen in São Paulo.

Kopenhagen began in a home kitchen in São Paulo. Portuguese Wikipedia says its founders, David and Anna Kopenhagen, were a Latvian couple who arrived in Brazil in the 1920s, and that in 1928 they began making marzipan, the European sweet of almonds and sugar, at home. Nestlé, its current majority owner, also dates the brand to 1928: “Kopenhagen’s history began in Brazil in 1928,” it said in 2023.

The date of the first shop is less settled. Portuguese Wikipedia gives two: one passage says the first shop opened in 1928, while its timeline places it in 1929, on Rua Miguel Couto in the centre of São Paulo. We give 1928 as the founding and leave the shop’s year open.

The business grew into a factory. In the 1930s, Portuguese Wikipedia says, the family bought a large plot in what is now the Itaim Bibi district, on a corner used as a football pitch by a local team; the Kopenhagen factory itself opened there in 1943. The company stayed in the family for decades; the sources we checked do not document who ran it between the founders’ era and the 1990s, and we do not guess.

The name is the founders’ surname, not a reference to the Danish capital, which Portuguese spells Copenhague or Copenhaga; Portuguese Wikipedia carries a note pointing readers looking for the city elsewhere.

Grupo CRM.

The modern company dates from 1996, when the businessman Celso Ricardo de Moraes bought Kopenhagen. Veja São Paulo reported in 2013 that it then had 100 shops and that he moved the factory out of Itaim Bibi within a year, to Tamboré, in the Barueri area west of the city; by 2013 there were 568 shops. His company, Grupo CRM became one of Brazil’s largest chocolate franchisors. In 2009 it launched a second, lower-priced chain, Brasil Cacau, according to Nestlé.

Production moved again soon after. On 13 April 2009 the company announced that it would close the Barueri factory and transfer production to Extrema, in the south of Minas Gerais, Folha de S.Paulo reported; the new complex opened on 31 August 2010 with capacity for 3,500 tonnes of chocolate a year for Kopenhagen, Brasil Cacau and a third brand, DanTop, Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios reported, after an investment of R$100 million. Portuguese Wikipedia gives Extrema as the company’s headquarters, and the later sources we found do not report a move.

Grupo CRM also helped bring a Swiss chocolatier to Brazil. On 11 March 2014 Lindt & Sprüngli announced a joint venture with the group, its first subsidiary in South America, owned 51% by Lindt and 49% by CRM, G1 reported.

The founder’s daughter, Renata Moraes Vichi, came to run the group: Nestlé said in 2023 that she had been with the company for 25 years and had built up and expanded Grupo CRM. In 2020, InfoMoney reported, funds managed by the American private-equity firm Advent International bought control of the group.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell chocolate, and they come from three countries: Royce’, Meiji and Morinaga from Japan, Garoto, Cacau Show and Kopenhagen from Brazil, and Ibarra from Mexico. Each guide looks at one name on its own terms, at home first and abroad second.

Chocolate brands reach people in different ways, and the differences show in their design. A mass-market confectioner sells bars and boxes through supermarkets and corner shops, where a wrapper has a moment to be recognised on a crowded shelf. A gift brand sells mainly through its own shops and counters, where the box, the ribbon and the shop itself carry much of the identity. A maker of a traditional product — a tablet bought for the kitchen rather than as a treat — may keep the same carton for decades, so that the package itself becomes the brand. Many firms do more than one of these things at once.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Língua de Gato and Nhá Benta.

On 7 September 2023 Nestlé announced an agreement with Advent International to acquire a majority stake in Grupo CRM, which it described as operating more than 1,000 chocolate boutiques under the Kopenhagen and Brasil Cacau brands. The deal was expected to close in 2024, subject to regulatory approval, and the financial terms were not disclosed; Renata Vichi would remain chief executive and a minority shareholder. Nestlé said the purchase would take it into the high-end segment of Brazilian confectionery. By July 2024 Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios was describing Kopenhagen as acquired by Nestlé in 2024; we did not find the exact closing date.

Nestlé’s announcement named the house’s classics: Língua de Gato, Nhá Benta, Lajotinha and Chumbinho among them. Língua de Gato — cat’s tongue, a flat oblong chocolate — is the best known and the most contested. Kopenhagen says its version was created in the founders’ kitchen in the 1940s and has been made to the same recipe for more than 80 years. The shape itself is older: the Austrian maker Küfferle, owned by Lindt since 1994, claims to have produced Katzenzungen since 1892, Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios noted. Kopenhagen registered the name as a trademark in Brazil; on 1 July 2024 a federal judge in Rio de Janeiro ruled, in a case brought by a company in the Cacau Show group, that the term describes the product and that the registrations should be annulled; Grupo CRM said it would appeal and that the first-instance decision had no immediate effect.

We found no published brand guidelines and no official colour values; Kopenhagen’s own account of its history here comes from statements reported in the press and from Nestlé.

For a design guide, Kopenhagen shows how a family chocolate house can carry its founders’ name and recipes through a change of owner, a new factory and a new parent. Compare Garoto, Nestlé’s other Brazilian chocolate name, and Cacau Show, the younger São Paulo chain it met in court. For this guide we use bitter chocolate, garnet and old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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