A privatisation group, an 1874 factory and a 2002 rebrand.

Roshen is younger than most of its factories. In 1993, two years after Ukrainian independence, the family of the businessman Petro Poroshenko set up Ukrprominvest, a group that bought into former state-owned factories as they were privatised. In 1996, after acquiring confectionery factories in Kyiv and Vinnytsia, it formed a confectionery business, Ukrprominvest-Kondyter, English Wikipedia says; a factory in Mariupol followed in 1997, a dairy in Bershad in 1998 and a factory in Kremenchuk in 2000. In 2000 it also bought a confectionery factory in Lipetsk, Russia, its first outside Ukraine.

The Kyiv factory was by far the oldest piece. It was founded in 1874 by Valentin Yefimov as a steam-powered chocolate and sweet factory in the Demiivka district, according to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine as cited by English Wikipedia; in 1923 the Soviet authorities named it after Karl Marx. It was there, in 1956, that the Kyiv cake was created: two meringue layers with hazelnuts, a buttercream-style filling and a chocolate glaze, sold in a box showing a horse-chestnut leaf, the emblem that appeared on the Soviet-era arms of Kyiv. Several stories about its invention circulate; a Roshen spokeswoman told the Kyiv Post that the popular tale of a mistake in the kitchen is a city legend, and that the recipe came from long, purposeful work.

The name came in 2002. English Wikipedia, citing a case study by the Kyiv agency Marketing Technologies Bureau, says the group commissioned new branding from that agency, which took the first two and last two letters off the surname Poroshenko to leave Roshen, with the slogan “the sweet quality mark.” Because the company worried that the new name did not sound Ukrainian enough, three origin legends were drafted for it, about a visiting count, a Swiss quality mark and an ancient god of sweets; all three were dropped unused, according to the Ukrainian brand site WeLoveBrands.

Factories abroad, a Russian ban and a blind trust.

Expansion abroad followed. In 2006 Roshen bought a confectionery factory in Klaipėda, Lithuania, renamed Roshen Klaipėda Confectionery Factory in 2010, and from March 2012 it has made products with the contract manufacturer Bonbonetti in Budapest, Hungary. The trade magazine Candy Industry ranked Roshen 18th in its 2012 list of the world’s largest confectionery companies.

Russia had been its biggest export market. In July 2013 Russia’s consumer-protection agency banned imports of Roshen products, citing labelling, Interfax-Ukraine reported; English Wikipedia says Russia had accounted for about 40 per cent of the company’s gross revenue. In March 2014 the Lipetsk factory was shut down and its local director charged over the use of a registered trademark, Reuters reported that April. Ukrainska Pravda reported in January 2017 that Roshen was closing the Lipetsk factory, whose property had been seized by Russian investigators, and production stopped that April. In February 2024 a district court in Lipetsk transferred the factory to Russian state ownership, Kommersant reported. English Wikipedia says the Mariupol factory closed in 2015.

Ownership became a political question in 2014. Poroshenko, standing for president, said he would sell Roshen if elected, Bloomberg reported in April 2014; he won and served as president from 2014 to 2019, but no buyer was found. He then moved his shares into a blind trust, and in April 2016 the Kyiv Post reported that Rothschild Trust had confirmed the trust deed. The group built a biscuit complex in Boryspil, near Kyiv, in 2018–19. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the corporation suspended work at its Kyiv and Boryspil factories in March 2022 and cut capacity at Vinnytsia and Kremenchuk, English Wikipedia says. On 7 February 2026 a Russian drone attack set fire to Roshen warehouses in Yahotyn, in Kyiv region, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and they come from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Austria and Hungary, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Serbia: Sokołów, Roshen, Krasny Oktyabr, Kotányi, Kraš, Hamé and Bambi. Food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname 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 brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or treat 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 food is 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 food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One umbrella over several hundred sweets.

Roshen works as a single umbrella brand. English Wikipedia describes “ROSHEN” as the overarching brand for everything the corporation makes, which it puts at more than 350 items, from chocolate and jelly sweets, caramel and toffee to chocolate bars, biscuits, wafers, sponge rolls, pastries and cakes. Some of the products carry names older than the brand. Ukrainian Wikipedia lists the Kyiv cake and sweets such as Kyiv Vechirnii (“Kyiv evening”), Chervonyi Mak (“red poppy”), Shalena Bdzhilka (“crazy bee”) and Korivka among the best known.

Production is spread across Ukraine and two EU countries. Ukrainian Wikipedia lists factories in Kyiv, Vinnytsia and Kremenchuk, the Klaipėda factory in Lithuania, the Bonbonetti factory in Budapest, the biscuit complex in Boryspil, a dairy in Vinnytsia that supplies milk to the group’s factories, and a logistics centre in Yahotyn. English Wikipedia lists exports to markets including Poland, the Baltic states, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Israel, the United States and Canada.

The brand has also lived outside the shop. From 2005 Roshen installed branded children’s playgrounds in Ukrainian cities, about 80 in all, and maintained them although they stood on municipal land; in 2019 it ended the project, citing vandalism, Ukrinform reported, and its branding was removed from the sites.

For a design guide, Roshen shows how a name trimmed from a surname became a national confectionery brand, with Soviet-era classics such as the Kyiv cake and its chestnut-leaf box kept inside it. Compare Wawel, Kraków’s chocolate maker, and Kalev, Estonia’s confectioner. For this guide we use a chocolate brown, a poppy red and a gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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