A town name, a processing plant and a carrot juice.

Łowicz is first of all a place: a market town in central Poland, west of Warsaw. The brand took its name from the town’s fruit and vegetable processing plant, which became the core of one of the country’s best-known jam and tomato labels. The date of the plant’s opening depends on the source. The company history published by Agros Nova, cited by English Wikipedia, says the processing plant in Łowicz opened in 1965, and the current owner, Maspex, says the brand has been with Polish consumers since 1965. Polish Wikipedia’s article on the town, citing a 1983 guidebook to Poland, says a large fruit and vegetable processing plant was started in the town in 1963. Both dates belong to the planned economy of the Polish People’s Republic, when the town grew into a centre of food, light and building-materials industry.

The early company history is told mainly by its later owners. According to the Agros Nova history, the Łódź Wine Factory was spun off from the Łowicz business in 1987, and a few years later a wood packaging plant at Andrzejów was handed to another state firm. The same history credits Łowicz with launching the first carrot juices on the Polish market, under the name Karotka, a drink later sold under the Fortuna label. In 1995 the plant marked its thirtieth anniversary with a picnic, the company says.

Łowicz is not the only food name the town has given the world. The town’s dairy cooperative, Okręgowa Spółdzielnia Mleczarska w Łowiczu, has worked there since 1906, Polish Wikipedia says, and is a separate business with no link to the jam and tomato brand.

From a holding company to the jam shelf.

After 1989 the plant passed into the Agros group. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s own history, describes Agros Holding S.A. as a joint-stock company founded in 1990, from which Agros Nova was spun off in 2000, with its head office in Warsaw. In 2000 and 2001, the company says, it cut its range from about 600 items to about 200 while spending more on marketing and distribution, and it describes its business at the time as the largest Polish producer of jams and tomato preserves. In March 2002 a new company, Agros Fortuna, was split off from the holding; it took the Łowicz factory together with processing plants in Białystok and Tarczyn.

In August 2010 the private equity firm IK Investment Partners bought Agros Nova, according to IK’s own investment record. Under IK the brand was run as a busy line of new products. Agros Nova’s archived brand calendar for 2012 lists, among other launches, Italian-style sauces in three flavours, a limited run of Asian-style sauces, syrups in seasonal flavours, and a premium jam line called “100% z owoców” (100% from fruit), which the company said was sweetened only with concentrated apple juice. In October 2012 two limited marmalades appeared with recipes for home baking printed on the label.

The same calendar records trade and consumer awards for individual products that year. Łowicz strawberry jam took first place in the jam category of the Złoty Paragon 2012 competition run by the trade magazine Hurt i Detal; the 190 g tomato concentrate won a gold medal in a consumer vote organised by Wiadomości Handlowe; and the women’s magazine Pani Domu named the strawberry jam and the tomato purée in a carton “Produkt na medal.” These were awards for products rather than for design, and no designer or agency for the Łowicz labels is named in the company’s published material.

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 Wadowice group, the same town, a wider range.

The brand changed hands again in 2015. On 19 December 2014 the business portal of Onet reported that Grupa Maspex of Wadowice had signed a preliminary agreement with IK Investment Partners to buy selected Agros Nova assets: two production plants, in Łowicz and Wąsosz, and the brands Łowicz, Krakus, Kotlin, Włocławek, Fruktus, Tarczyn and DrWitt. The deal needed the approval of Poland’s competition authority, and the parties did not disclose its value. Maspex’s president, Krzysztof Pawiński, said the group had worked for years on an acquisition of that kind, and Maspex said it planned to continue production in Łowicz and Wąsosz. Polish Wikipedia, citing Wyborcza.biz of 21 July 2015, records the purchase as completed that summer. Agros Nova’s drinks business, with Fortuna, went separately to Polmlek in 2015, English Wikipedia says.

Maspex lists 2015 in its acquisition history as the year of “Agros Nova and the brands Łowicz, Krakus, Kotlin, Włocławek, Tarczyn, Dr Witt, Fruktus.” The group now sits the brand next to its own drinks names, including Tymbark. Maspex says it has 18 production plants, ten of them in Poland, and it still lists Łowicz among the Polish sites, alongside Wąsosz Dolny, Białystok, Tymbark and others.

Maspex describes Łowicz today as a family of fruit and vegetable products that combines tradition with openness to new flavours. Its range covers jam products (including plum powidła), tomato products from concentrate and purée to passata and canned tomatoes, sauces, syrups, snack pouches and rice-and-fruit desserts. Maspex calls Łowicz the market leader in jam products, sauces and tomato purées, and says the brand runs limited editions through the year, some with occasional labels.

For a design guide, Łowicz shows how the name of a small town and its processing plant can become the label for a whole shelf of jams and tomato products, outliving three owners. Compare Tymbark, another Polish place name inside the Maspex group, and Krakus, the pickle and soup brand that came to Maspex in the same deal. For this guide we use strawberry red, tomato and leaf green with a warm book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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