A former Jagódka plant, an idea in 1993 and a first batch in 1994.

Kubuś was born in Olsztynek, a small town in the Warmia and Masuria region of north-east Poland, not at the company that owns it today. Maspex’s own account of its Olsztynek factory says the plant, once called “Jagódka”, was built between 1975 and 1985; that the idea for a purée juice called Kubuś came in 1993; and that the juice was first produced there a year later, in 1994, a production run the company says has continued ever since. Polish Wikipedia describes the business that made it, Polska Żywność S.A. of Olsztynek, as a producer of fruit-and-vegetable juices for children, Kubuś among them.

In 1995 that business joined the Maspex group. Maspex lists “Polska Żywność of Olsztynek and the Kubuś brand” as the first entry in its history of acquisitions, and Polish Wikipedia, citing the company and the business site WP Finanse (2017), gives the same year. Maspex was then young. Polish Wikipedia says it was set up in Wadowice, south-west of Kraków, in 1990 by five partners, Sławomir Rusinek, Krzysztof Pawiński, Józef Szczur, Zdzisław Struglik and Jerzy Kasperczyk, and that it began by packing coffee whitener and cocoa before moving into instant drinks and sweets.

The Olsztynek factory remains the home of the brand. It now runs as the Olsztynek branch of Tymbark-MWS, the Maspex company that also makes Tymbark, and Maspex says it employs nearly 800 people there. The company ties the juice to its setting: it describes Olsztynek as lying far from big industrial cities, in a region promoted as the “Green Lungs of Poland,” and says Kubuś juices are made from Marchew Mazurska, a selected variety of Mazurian carrot grown in the area. Polish Wikipedia says the juice line is in Olsztynek and that bottling also takes place at the group’s plant in Tychy, in Silesia, which Maspex opened in 2000. The Olsztynek site processes fruit and vegetables for the whole group, the company adds.

One recipe, many names.

The first Kubuś was a cloudy purée juice of carrot and fruit, and that is still how Maspex describes the brand’s core: once associated mainly with purée juices made from Mazurian carrot and fruit, Kubuś, the company says, is still a byword for carrot juice in Poland. Around it the range has widened to juices, drinks, fruit mousses, desserts and a flavoured water sold as Kubuś Waterrr, and Polish Wikipedia, citing a Maspex announcement, says Kubuś biscuits went on sale in 2016. Maspex says the Olsztynek lines fill PET bottles, cartons made from renewable materials, stand-up pouches and glass bottles of several sizes.

Kubuś also travels under other names. A case study in a marketing-research textbook annex published by PWN, drawing on Gazeta Krakowska of 30 August 2003, reported that the juice was sold as Kubik in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as Kubus in Germany, the United States and Lithuania, as Kubu in Hungary and as Tedi in Romania, and that apart from the name neither the taste nor the graphic design of the pack was changed. The same report said that from August 2003 Maspex set out to sell the juice in the European Union under its own brand, beginning with a television and press campaign in Germany on stations including RTL, ProSieben and Sat.1. Maspex today lists Tedi, Kubu and Kubik among the export brands made in Olsztynek.

The brand has collected trade awards in Poland. Polish Wikipedia lists the “Towar Roku 2004” (Product of the Year) title from the monthly Marketing w Praktyce, among others, and NowyMarketing reported in 2017 that Kubuś was among the Maspex brands named in the Rzeczpospolita ranking of the most valuable Polish brands. Maspex says Kubuś leads its categories of children’s juices, nectars, drinks and mousses in Poland and in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Poland: Goplana, Mlekovita, Łowicz, Krakus, Żywiec, Kubuś and Winiary. Polish food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from cooperatives and family firms to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop 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.

A children’s brand inside a Wadowice food group.

Kubuś has grown up inside what Maspex calls one of the largest food producers in Central and Eastern Europe. After buying the Olsztynek business in 1995, Maspex bought Tymbark in 1999, the pasta and flour maker Lubella in 2003 and, in 2015, assets of Agros Nova with brands including Łowicz, Krakus, Kotlin and Tarczyn, the company’s acquisition history shows. It moved into spirits in 2022 with the purchase of CEDC, owner of Żubrówka and Soplica, and in 2023 bought the Czech maker of Becherovka. Maspex says it has made 22 acquisitions, 12 of them outside Poland, and that it runs 18 production plants, ten of them in Poland and the rest in Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria. Its head office remains in Wadowice.

Much of the brand’s public face is aimed at children and their parents. Kubuś runs Kubusiowi Przyjaciele Natury (“Kubuś’s Friends of Nature”), an education programme about ecology for kindergartens and primary schools; portalspożywczy.pl has reported on its launch, and Maspex says more than five million children have taken part. The company also says the brand has redecorated more than 50 hospital children’s wards in an art project called Kubusiowe Szpitale (“Kubuś Hospitals”). Maspex presents its children’s range under a set of rules it calls “Dziecięce Standardy” (Children’s Standards), which it says cover ingredients, packaging suited to small hands and checks at more than 100 points in production.

For a design guide, Kubuś shows how a regional carrot juice from a single factory in Masuria could keep one pack design while changing its name from country to country. Compare Łowicz, a sister brand inside Maspex, and Andros, the French fruit company. For this guide we use a carrot orange, a leaf green and a sunny yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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