A pastry shop in Bolzano’s old town.

Loacker began in Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol, in 1925. English Wikipedia describes its founder, Alfons Loacker, as an Austrian confectioner who opened a small shop with two assistants in the city’s historic centre; Italian Wikipedia places the shop first on Via della Roggia, the Rauschertorgasse, and then on Piazza Domenicani. The company’s own history puts it slightly differently: it says Alfons realised his dream in 1925 by taking over the Bolzano pastry shop where he had worked since he was a boy.

The product at the centre of that story is the wafer. The company says Alfons created the “cialda di Bolzano,” the Bolzano wafer — thin, crisp sheets filled with cream — which it describes as as tempting as fresh pastry but more practical and longer-keeping. The wafer, rather than cakes or biscuits in the usual sense, has stayed the core of the business for a century, alongside chocolate and the products made from both.

The family’s second generation arrived after the war. According to the company, Alfons’s son Armin Loacker joined in 1958 as head of production, and ten years later his sister Christine joined to run administration and distribution. The company dates its turn towards industry to 1967–69, when, it says, an automated wafer oven made output grow sharply, a “freshness-saving” pack allowed the first exports, and an arched cooling plant made its workshop one of the most important in South Tyrol.

From the city to the Renon.

The decisive move came in 1974. Production left Bolzano for Auna di Sotto (Unterinn), a village on the Renon plateau above the city, at about 1,000 metres. Italian Wikipedia records Armin’s motto for the choice: “a natural product is made in a natural environment.” The company adds that, despite the hairpin bends on the road up, Armin believed truly good things were made only where the air was pure and the view of the Sciliar lifted the spirits — and that from there the wafers spread from South Tyrol to the rest of northern Italy and then abroad.

A second plant followed across the border. The company’s timeline records the opening of a factory at Heinfels, in East Tyrol in Austria, “at the entrance to an idyllic valley” and again about 1,000 metres up, in an entry dated 1999 and 2007 that it shares with the first Loacker Café. English Wikipedia says that both sites, Auna di Sotto and Heinfels, make wafers and chocolate specialities at more than 1,000 metres above sea level. Those are the only two factories named in the sources we checked.

The best-known flavour is Napolitaner. Wikipedia, in both languages, says the name comes from the hazelnuts in the cream, which once came from the area around Naples; the company now says it covers part of its hazelnut needs from two farms it owns in Tuscany and from some 90 contract growers in Veneto, Umbria, Tuscany and the Marche. Its current range includes the bite-sized Quadratini, which its website says come in 18 flavours, the Tortina, and a layered snack called Break3.

The family has also built a supply chain around the wafers. English Wikipedia describes Dolomites Milk, a milk- and whey-powder plant at Vandoies run as a joint venture between Loacker and the South Tyrolean dairy cooperative BRIMI, which supplies the dairy creams. In 2022 Loacker announced a multi-year partnership with Sammontana to make Loacker-branded ice creams, according to both Wikipedias.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make biscuits, and they come from four countries: LU and St Michel from France, Loacker, Balocco and Mulino Bianco from Italy, Arnott’s from Australia, and Pepperidge Farm from the United States. Biscuit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still bake in the town where they started to names that have passed between food groups several times, and a single packet can carry the history of more than one owner.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a recipe than by a pack, a shape and a name, because the biscuit on the shelf may be baked a long way from the place the name recalls. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, how its packaging came to look the way it does, and where its biscuits are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its pack and where it bakes — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A mountain in the mark and gnomes on television.

Loacker’s identity leans on its landscape. The company says the Sciliar (Schlern), the flat-topped massif that it calls the emblem of South Tyrol, appears in the Loacker logo to stand for naturalness, genuineness and the origin of its products. It has not published colour or typeface specifications in the sources we checked, so the palette and type here are our own.

Television added a second set of characters. The company dates the first appearance of the Gnometti, its cartoon gnomes, in an Italian TV spot to 1984, and says they helped it win leadership of the Italian market; Italian Wikipedia remembers the gnomes telling the Napolitaner story in advertisements from the 1980s into the new century. The gnomes still have their own section on the company’s website.

The business remains in the founding family’s hands. The company says the third generation joined in 1996: Armin’s sons Andreas and Martin Loacker and their cousin Ulrich Zuenelli, who led sales and chairs the board. The company’s website gives its name as A. Loacker Spa/AG, at Auna di Sotto. English Wikipedia reports that in 2025 it made 1.05 billion individual pieces, sold 37,510 tonnes of products and had net sales of €480 million, with Italy its largest market, followed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. It also distributes other companies’ brands in Italy, including Twinings and Ovomaltine.

Loacker has returned to its shop-front origins with cafés. The company’s timeline records the opening of the first Loacker Café, at the Brenner, presenting it as a return to 1925, when Loacker was a sweet shop and pastry maker; its website now lists five, in Bolzano, Trento, the Twenty shopping centre, the Brenner and Heinfels.

For a design guide, Loacker shows how a place — a mountain, a plateau, a region’s name on a wafer — can carry a brand for a century. Compare Manner, the Viennese wafer maker whose mark shows St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and Ferrero Rocher, another northern Italian hazelnut name. For this guide we use a wafer red, gold and Alpine white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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