A business-school graduate, a 1913 recipe and a rented dairy plant.

Siggi’s is an American brand of skyr, the thick, strained dairy food of Iceland, and it writes its own name in lower case as “siggi’s”. English Wikipedia says the brand is owned by the Icelandic Milk & Skyr Corporation, now a subsidiary of the French dairy group Lactalis, and that the company was founded in 2005 by the Icelander Siggi Hilmarsson.

Hilmarsson came to New York to study. Wikipedia says he moved to the United States in 2002 to take an MBA at Columbia Business School, and that in 2004 he began making his own yogurt from a 1913 recipe his mother had found at a library in Reykjavík. He wanted, in the words Wikipedia quotes, “less sugar and less ingredients”, and he missed the thick texture of the skyr he had grown up with. A profile from Bloomberg, carried by Perishable News on 13 August 2010, says he had worked in investment banking and at the consultancy Deloitte, and that he began making skyr in his own sink.

The kitchen experiment soon moved to a dairy plant. Perishable News says that in 2005 Hilmarsson rented space from an upstate New York agricultural school; Wikipedia names it as a test dairy plant at Morrisville State College. Plant rules did not allow him to take the yogurt home unlabelled, the 2010 profile says, so he put stickers on the cups and named the brand Siggi’s. Wikipedia says his test batches were, in his own words, “sometimes great, sometimes horrible”.

The money came from people close to him. Wikipedia says the initial investment came from Michael van Biema, his professor at Columbia, and later from friends and family, and FoodIngredientsFirst described the start in January 2018 as seed investment from his former professor. Perishable News says Hilmarsson left Deloitte in the autumn of 2005 to work on Siggi’s full time, and Wikipedia says that decision followed the success of his first bulk order.

A cheese counter, a national grocer, a Swiss stake and a French owner.

The yogurt’s early retail home was a Manhattan cheese counter. Wikipedia says Hilmarsson gave a test batch to Liz Thorpe, a friend who was a vice president at Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village, and that one of her buyers offered to stock the yogurt if he made it regularly. Perishable News dates the start to July 2006, when Murray’s began carrying it, and says the New York food shops Dean & DeLuca and Zabar’s followed the next summer. FoodIngredientsFirst reported that Siggi’s also began selling at an outdoor market in downtown Manhattan in 2006.

A national grocer then changed the scale. Wikipedia says Whole Foods Market contacted Hilmarsson in late 2007 and asked him to present in Austin, Texas, and that in January 2008 the yogurt went on sale across Whole Foods stores in many parts of the country at once, rather than region by region. To prepare, Perishable News says, he built a factory in Norwich, in central New York, in late 2007, with loans from friends. Wikipedia says demand in the summer of 2008 outran that plant, which was shut for several months and rebuilt.

Manufacturing grew in stages after that. Wikipedia says the company began moving to a larger plant in 2013 and within a few years had a backup manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, quoting Hilmarsson that a growing business should not rely on just one plant. Meanwhile the Swiss dairy group Emmi had taken a minority stake in the Icelandic Milk and Skyr Corporation through two transactions in 2012 and 2013, FoodIngredientsFirst reported on 5 January 2018, the day it covered Emmi’s sale of that stake.

The sale was part of a change of owner. Dairy Industries International reported on 10 January 2018 that Lactalis had agreed to acquire Siggi’s, subject to the US Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period, and that Siggi’s would keep operating from its New York City office as a standalone company, with its founder as chief executive and Bart Adlam as president. The magazine quoted Hilmarsson as saying the company was excited to join “the Lactalis family”. Lactalis, whose labels include Président and Galbani, has owned Siggi’s since 2018, and Wikipedia says the brand continues to be run independently.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American yogurt names. Yogurt reaches people through a cup more than through any other object: a small tub of plastic or, less often, glass, kept cold from the dairy to the store and sealed with a foil or film lid under a snap-on cap. Single cups sit side by side in a chilled case, larger tubs sit on the shelf below, and multipacks are held together by a cardboard sleeve or a band, so a brand has to read clearly from a short distance and at a glance.

Because one spoonful of plain yogurt looks much like another, much of a yogurt brand’s identity is carried by the cup itself: its shape, the colour of the lid, the band of type around the side and the picture of fruit or flavour on the foil. The questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where the yogurt is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A lower-case first name, a short flavour list and a coffee-shop deal.

The identity began as a practical label. The 2010 Perishable News profile says the name went onto the cups as stickers because the plant required labelled product, and the brand has carried the founder’s first name since. Wikipedia records the company’s own styling in lower case, as “siggi’s dairy”, and the parent company has kept its descriptive corporate name, the Icelandic Milk and Skyr Corporation, through each change of investor.

The flavour list is short and plainly named. Wikipedia lists flavours including vanilla, blueberry, mixed berries and açaí and orange and ginger, and says a mint and pear flavour was dropped around 2009 because of problems in the fruit supply chain. Wikipedia says the brand initially struggled because of its tart taste and low sugar, and that The Atlantic described the yogurt in 2014 as tangy and sour.

Distribution widened in the years after the Whole Foods launch. Wikipedia says that at the end of 2016 Siggi’s announced a deal to place its products in Starbucks locations, and the January 2018 acquisition report in Dairy Industries International names mainstream grocery chains such as Stop & Shop, Meijer and Publix among its stockists. The recipe idea stayed Icelandic throughout: the same report described Siggi’s as a maker of Icelandic-style skyr, based on the yogurt Hilmarsson grew up eating in Iceland.

For a design guide, Siggi’s shows how a founder’s first name, written in lower case and first applied as a sticker, can serve as the whole brand mark as a small New York dairy becomes part of an international group. Compare it with Fage, the Athens dairy behind another strained yogurt on American shelves, and Président, the Camembert label from the same Lactalis group. For this guide we use Nordic navy, glacier blue, skyr white and moss pale with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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