Mark Brawerman, Turtle Mountain and a dairy-free name.

So Delicious Dairy Free is an American brand of dairy-free frozen desserts, plant-based milks, coffee creamers and yogurt alternatives that grew up in Eugene, Oregon. A 17 September 2014 press release from the WhiteWave Foods Company, published by New Hope Network, says the business was founded in 1987 by Mark Brawerman, who served as its chief executive until 2013, and describes it as based in Eugene, Oregon.

For much of its life the brand sat inside a company with a different name. An archived 2012 version of the company website, at turtlemountain.com, describes Turtle Mountain LLC as the creator of the So Delicious Dairy Free brand and as a privately held natural foods company headquartered in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The same page says the company has specialised in dairy-free products since 1987.

That archived page also tells the founding story in the company’s own words. Turtle Mountain says it began as a one-man operation run by Brawerman, then its chief executive and president, who started by developing a series of non-dairy frozen dessert recipes. The company says that from 1990 it moved beyond frozen desserts into a wider range of beverages, creamers and cultured products, and in 2012 it said its products were carried in grocery and natural food stores in the United States, as well as in Canada and Korea.

By 2014 the brand had outside investors. The WhiteWave release says the business was being bought from its existing shareholders, a group led by Wasserstein & Co., and it quotes Chuck Marcy as the chief executive of So Delicious Dairy Free at the time of the sale. In that statement Marcy says the company had spent more than 25 years making dairy-free foods and drinks. The brand’s own website still uses the full name So Delicious Dairy Free, and it says the brand has been making dairy-free products for more than 35 years.

WhiteWave in 2014, Danone in 2017 and production in Pennsylvania.

The sale to a larger food company came in 2014. WhiteWave, the company behind the Silk plant-based milks, announced its agreement to acquire So Delicious on 17 September 2014. In the release, WhiteWave chairman and chief executive Gregg Engles says the brand would build on the company’s Silk and Alpro platform and give WhiteWave entry into the category of plant-based frozen desserts. English Wikipedia’s article on Danone North America says WhiteWave announced on 31 October 2014 that the takeover was complete.

The second change followed through WhiteWave itself. English Wikipedia says that Danone, the French food group, announced a deal to acquire WhiteWave on 7 July 2016, and that the acquisition was completed in April 2017. The combined American business was first called DanoneWave and was renamed Danone North America in April 2018; Wikipedia gives its base as White Plains, New York. Food Dive reported on 12 January 2021 that the brand had been around since 1987, that WhiteWave bought it in 2014 and that it became a Danone brand through the WhiteWave deal. Danone has owned So Delicious since 2017. The brand’s website now describes So Delicious as part of Danone USA Public Benefit Corporation.

Part of the range is made in Pennsylvania. Abasto reported on 11 February 2019 that Danone North America had expanded its facility at DuBois, Pennsylvania, built on a site that was once a local airport, and that after the expansion the plant would produce So Delicious Dairy Free yogurt alternatives and dairy-free cheese shreds, alongside Silk yogurt alternatives.

Under Danone the range kept widening. VegNews reported on 20 August 2020 that So Delicious had launched a Light Frozen Desserts line, a rebrand of a frozen mousse line that had reached stores in 2018, made with a base of coconut oil and pea protein; the same report said the brand had added flavours to its oat-milk frozen dessert range earlier that year. Food Dive reported in January 2021 that So Delicious had moved into shredded and sliced cheeses, with creamy spreads to follow in March.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group live in the chilled and frozen aisles: frozen pizzas, coffee creamers and plant-based milks. Their packaging is usually seen through a freezer door or on a crowded refrigerated shelf, so the identity has to work on a pizza box, a creamer bottle or a milk carton as much as on a logo sheet, and it is often carried by colour, a flavour picture and the name of each variety.

Many brands like these began with a single founder, a family business or a small regional company and now sit inside much larger food groups, so the name on the box may have outlived several owners, moved between factories or been licensed to another company in a different market. That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its pizzas, creamers or milks are actually made.

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 creamer carton, a black-and-white logo and colour that rises like steam.

One well-documented piece of So Delicious design is a coffee-creamer carton. The packaging research firm Designalytics chose the brand’s coconut-milk creamer for its “Redesign of the Month” feature on 9 January 2024, and listed the agency behind the work as unknown.

Designalytics describes the earlier carton as built on simplicity. It says the old design used plenty of white space, set the product name and ingredient claims in soft-grey type, and showed each flavour with a restrained image; for French Vanilla, a single vanilla flower rested on a coffee cup with creamer swirling in the coffee, while the name of the variety sat in small type near the top of the carton, just below the spout.

The new carton, in Designalytics’ account, puts flavour first. It says the redesign dropped the claims about ingredients and reduced fat, made slight adjustments to the main colour of each variety and changed the logo to black and white. Its central device is a winding swath of colour that rises from the cup, as steam rises from hot coffee, and carries the name of the flavour; on French Vanilla, Designalytics notes, three vanilla flowers replace the single one.

The frozen-dessert range has been repackaged as well. VegNews quoted senior brand manager Jessica Holland in August 2020 saying that the new Light Frozen Desserts came with updated flavour names and refreshed packaging. On the 2012 Turtle Mountain website the brand name is set inside the slogan “So passionate. So pure. So kind. So Delicious.”, and the current site uses trademarked lines such as “Dairy free your mind”.

For a design guide, So Delicious shows how a dairy-free brand can let a plain black-and-white name step back and hand the carton to flavour colour, so that each variety reads at a glance. Compare it with Silk, its stablemate at Danone North America, and Califia Farms, another American plant-milk brand. For this guide we use carton black, berry, coconut white and vanilla gold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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