A cloth-maker’s wafers on the promenade.

Opavia is a twentieth-century name on a nineteenth-century business. Its packs have carried the line “Založeno 1840” — founded 1840 — and Czech Wikipedia, citing the regional newspaper Opavský a hlučínský deník in 2007, ties that date to the Fiedor family of Opava, in Czech Silesia. According to Czech Wikipedia, the cloth-maker Kaspar Melchior Balthasar Fiedor began making wafers in 1840 as a side income, and his wife Amálie, who came from a baking family, pressed the fashionable spa wafers and sold them on the town’s new park promenade, laid out after Opava’s walls were pulled down.

Their youngest son, Theodor Fiedor, a bookbinder by training, took over the business in 1879. With his wife Marie Fiedorová he set up a larger, machine-equipped workshop in the 1880s, and from 1887 she ran the firm herself — unusual for a company of its size at the time, Czech Wikipedia notes. Under her a new factory on Olomoucká street was built in 1901 and approved for operation in 1902, with rotary ovens that let the range grow from wafers to gingerbread, rusks and tea biscuits. Czech Wikipedia lists Hungary, Galicia, Austria and Silesia among its markets before the First World War.

The family firm became a limited company in 1926 and came through the Second World War with little damage, Czech Wikipedia says, but it was taken from the Fiedors after the Communist takeover of February 1948 and struck from the register in 1951. The family name survives in Fidorka, the round chocolate-coated wafer still sold under the Opavia umbrella. Reporting on the Opava plant in 2018, the news site Novinky.cz likewise traced biscuit-making in the town back to 1840 and the Fiedors.

From Tatranky to Opavia.

The brand’s best-known product is older than the Opavia name. Tatranky, layered filled wafers dipped in chocolate around their edges, were first made and named in 1945, Czech Wikipedia says, citing a 2005 iDNES.cz report. Made by hand at first, they were triangular, like mountain peaks — hence the name, after the Tatra mountains — but the shape became a rectangle because triangles were harder to coat and wrap on a production line. Czech Wikipedia credits the production technology to a worker, Vilém Škvarlo, and says a fully coated version called Stadionka was made in the 1960s and then dropped because it needed more chocolate.

Nationalisation folded the Fiedor works into the state enterprise Československé čokoládovny in 1947, according to Czech Wikipedia. The name Opavia itself dates from 1958, when the Silesian fine-bakery enterprise in Opava was merged with the Prague long-life bakery enterprise and the Opava works became a branch plant called Opavia. At first the name meant the factory; today Opavia is used only as a product brand, Czech Wikipedia says.

Under that umbrella sit biscuit and wafer lines including Zlaté, BeBe, Fidorka and Kolonáda spa wafers, among others listed by Czech Wikipedia. The Tatranky name is not exclusive to Opavia: Czech Wikipedia notes that the Slovak firm Sedita, at Sereď, also makes Tatranky, and that both companies make Horalky wafers.

Since privatisation the Opavia mark has carried a symbol — poppies at first and later ears of grain, Czech Wikipedia says — together with the 1840 founding line. Between 2016 and 2018 Mondelēz ran new campaigns for it: Hospodářské noviny reported in October 2016 on a campaign thanking customers for their loyalty, MediaGuru in October 2017 on plans to strengthen the branding, and MarketingSalesMedia in July 2018 on biscuit-themed sneakers aimed at younger shoppers.

Czech and Slovak brands.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from the Czech Republic or Slovakia: Opavia, Budvar, Kozel, Mattoni, Horalky, Figaro and Zlatý Bažant. Czech and Slovak food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still belong to the town or company where they began to names that now belong to much larger international groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the taste or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved production or grown far beyond the place 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.

Danone, Kraft Foods, Mondelēz.

After 1989 the business was privatised. In 1992, Czech Wikipedia says, the state chocolate and confectionery enterprise became Čokoládovny a.s., with two foreign partners: a Danone group joint venture from France and Switzerland’s Nestlé. In 1999 the business was divided — Nestlé kept chocolate, while a new company in the Danone group, Opavia a.s., took over long-life bakery production at Opava, at the Deli works in Lovosice and at Kolonáda in Mariánské Lázně. Two years later it was renamed Opavia – LU. In 2007 Opavia passed to the US group Kraft Foods, and in 2012 to Mondelēz International, formed when Kraft Foods split in two; iDNES.cz reported the Czech renaming in March 2012.

Opavia products are made in three Czech factories, Czech Wikipedia says: on modern lines at Opava and Lovosice, and with a large share of hand work at Mariánské Lázně; some are also made at Mondelēz plants abroad. In June 2018 Novinky.cz reported that Mondelēz had opened a new production hall at its Opava site, in the Vávrovice district where production moved in 1997, describing it as the group’s largest biscuit factory in Europe, with about 1,000 employees. Alongside Opavia lines for the Czech and Slovak markets, the site makes international brands including Oreo, Milka and belVita, the report said.

For a design guide, Opavia shows how the name of a nationalised factory became a consumer umbrella brand that dates itself to a family business of 1840. Compare LU, the French biscuit brand whose name it once carried, and Figaro, another Mondelēz brand made in Bratislava. For this guide we use wafer gold, cocoa brown and a deep red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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