How a Plymouth businessman got into cheese.

Sargento is a cheese company from Plymouth, Wisconsin. English Wikipedia says Sargento Foods Inc. was founded there in 1953 by Leonard Gentine and Joseph Sartori, and that the name itself joins theirs: a combination of Sartori and Gentine, with an “o” added to make it sound Italian, because the young company specialised in Italian-style cheeses.

The company tells its own origin story in some detail on its corporate history timeline. It says Leonard Gentine, Sr. had run a funeral parlour in Plymouth with his wife, Dolores, since the late 1930s, alongside several side businesses. In 1949, it says, a friend at a poker game asked him to source some cheese gift boxes for the holidays; in the course of that errand he learned about the cheese trade and saw an opening for what were then thought of as “exotic” Italian cheeses such as mozzarella and provolone. He started a mail-order cheese business run out of an old carriage house on his property, and later turned the carriage house into a shop, the Plymouth Cheese Counter.

The company dates its formal start to 23 October 1953, when, it says, Joe Sartori and Leonard Gentine, Sr. formed Sargento. By its account the business found a permanent production home in 1956, in a former plant of the Elkhart Lake Canning Company. In 1969, the timeline says, Sargento introduced peg-bar displays for hanging packaged cheese in the dairy case, and launched a seasoned shredded cheese sold as Taco Cheese.

One partner bought out, three generations in charge.

Sargento began as a partnership but became a family business early. The company says that in 1964 Leonard Gentine, Sr. asked Joe Sartori to sell him his stake, that Sartori agreed and stayed on as an adviser, and that the two remained friends; from that point Sargento was a Gentine family business. The Gentine family has owned Sargento since 1964, and English Wikipedia lists the company as private, with the Gentine family as owner.

Leadership has passed down the same line. The company’s timeline says that on 29 October 2013 Louie Gentine succeeded his father, Lou Gentine, as chief executive — thirty-two years to the day after Lou had succeeded his own father, Leonard, which places the earlier handover in 1981 — and that Lou continued as chairman of the board. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in a story by Doris Hajewski published on 22 May 2010, described Sargento as a family-owned business based in Plymouth and quoted Lou Gentine, then chief executive of the company his father founded, on the credo he had inherited: “Hire good people and treat them like family.” The paper reported that after Leonard Gentine’s death in 1996, the family set his ideas down in writing in a brochure explaining the company’s values.

The company still frames itself around that inheritance. Its corporate site, checked in October 2026, describes Sargento as private and family-owned, with third-generation family owners, and names Louie Gentine as chairman and chief executive. In 2018, the company says, it marked its sixty-fifth anniversary with a history, Treated Like Family, written by Tom Faley, a long-serving employee, and published by Center Street.

Design and documentation.

American dairy brands sit in a crowded chiller cabinet, and their packaging has to be read at a glance. Butter comes in boxes of sticks and in tubs, sour cream and cottage cheese in round plastic tubs, cream cheese in foil-wrapped bricks and tubs, milk and cream in gable-top cartons and plastic jugs, and whipped toppings in aerosol cans.

Pastoral imagery is a common thread: cows, barns, green fields, farm names and the sense of a particular place. Some brands belong to farmer-owned cooperatives and put that ownership on the pack with a co-op seal or a line about the farm families behind them; others belong to large food groups that have bought and sold names over many decades.

Colour does practical work too. Many milk and cream ranges use a colour for each fat level, so that whole, reduced-fat and fat-free versions can be told apart on the shelf, and flavour lines extend that system further.

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

Four logos and two truck fleets.

Sargento’s own timeline doubles as a short history of its marks. The company says its original logo, introduced in 1953, used the Leaning Tower of Pisa to underline the early focus on Italian cheeses. In the 1960s, it says, that gave way to a crown placed above the Sargento name; the crown logo went through several variations over the years, at times adding a circle and two sets of parallel lines on each side, but the crown itself stayed, and it represented the company well into the 1990s.

The same decade brought a cartoon spokesman. The company says many early advertisements featured a cast of hand-drawn characters, among them Sammy Sargento, a military man carrying a sword — possibly, it suggests, a nod to the Spanish meaning of sargento, “sergeant”. It credits the character to Margie Stroebel, the wife of future Sargento president Charles Stroebel and Leonard Gentine’s sister-in-law, and says Sammy promoted the cheeses into the 1970s.

A new logo followed in 1994, which the company presents as a response to changes in its packaging and products and to market research on how shoppers saw the brand. In 2005, the timeline says, Sargento introduced its primary burgundy colour and a prominent horizontal logo, creating a uniform look and a principal colour across its product lines so that shoppers could pick its packs out of an increasingly crowded dairy case.

The trucks carry the identity onto the road. The company says that in 2004 it gave its semi-trailers vinyl siding designed to make them look like giant blocks of cheese, and that in 2022 it released new truck designs, its previous ones dating from 2008, dominated by a “cheesy yellow” and carrying the line “We’re REAL CHEESE People®” alongside large images of its packaging.

For a design guide, Sargento shows how a family company can redraw its mark several times while settling on one colour to make a whole range read as a single brand. Compare it with Tillamook, the Oregon cheese brand, and Cabot Creamery, a Vermont cheesemaker in the same dairy case. For this guide we use Sargento burgundy and cellar maroon with cheddar yellow and a sturdy serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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