A Sicilian-born dairyman, four sons and a surplus of coffee creamer.

Swiss Miss is an American brand of instant hot cocoa mix, owned today by Conagra Brands. It began not in Switzerland but in Wisconsin, inside a family dairy-engineering business. According to The New York Times, which published an obituary of the brand’s developer in April 2019, the firm was Sanna Dairy Engineers, founded in Madison in 1935 by Anthony Sanna. The Times says he had come from Sicily to New York at 13 to live with an aunt, and that before settling in Wisconsin he managed a dairy company in Philadelphia, an ice cream company in Washington, a gelatin division of a Chicago meatpacking plant, a cream brokerage in Minnesota and a farmers’ cooperative in Missouri, before the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration recruited him to help Wisconsin dairy farmers. ConAgra Foods told a shorter version of the same story on its own brand page in 2007, saying Anthony R. Sanna left Sicily in the 1890s and became “a national authority on dairy activities.”

The business employed his sons. The Times names Leon, who was there from the start, Bartel, a brother-in-law, Roland Eissfeldt, and, after the Second World War, Anthony, a chemical engineer. Charles Sanna, a mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison who had overseen submarine construction at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine during the war, intended to return to the steel industry but was persuaded by his father to join the family firm, where he became chief engineer. Smithsonian magazine reported in April 2019 that he designed a large milk dryer that let the company produce and patent Sanalac, a nonfat dry milk.

The cocoa grew out of a military contract. In the 1950s, the Times reports, Charles Sanna found a way to extend the shelf life of powdered, sweetened coffee creamer by reducing the oxygen in each packet, which allowed the company to supply individual creamer packets to American troops in the Korean War. Because the contracts penalised short orders, the firm made extra, and it was left with surplus powder it could not use for later orders. Sanna decided it would make a good base for cocoa. He experimented on the stove of the family kitchen in Menomonie, Wisconsin, with his children and pupils from a local elementary school as tasters, working from the family cookbook to balance creamer, sugar, cocoa and vanilla. In 1963, the Times adds, he was awarded a patent for a process to make instantly soluble nonfat dry milk.

From Brown Swiss to Swiss Miss.

The first name was Brown Swiss. Both the Times and Smithsonian say Charles’s brother Anthony chose it, after the Swiss breed of dairy cattle, even though the Sanna products were made with milk from Holsteins. The mix was sold in pre-measured envelopes, mostly to airlines and restaurants, and those buyers stopped offering it after passengers and diners kept taking the packets home. ConAgra’s 2007 brand page put it more warmly, saying the cocoa “originally was served across America’s skies to airline passengers” and that frequent fliers went looking for it in grocery stores.

Selling it in shops meant a longer shelf life. According to the Times, the butterfat in the original powder would oxidise and turn rancid, so the recipe was changed to use nonfat milk powder, and Lucy Sanna recalled her father constantly testing versions on the family. Anthony Sanna renamed the product Swiss Miss, and it was introduced in 1961 as a mix that could be made with hot water rather than milk.

The girl in the name took a while to appear. Advertising Week reported in October 2019 that print advertising began in 1962 and that the earliest glimpse of the character was a mail-in offer for a doll in her likeness; the Times also mentions the Swiss Miss dolls. Her television debut came in 1972, according to Advertising Week, as a stop-motion figure with golden pigtails and a blue frock, animated by David William Allen at Cascade Pictures and voiced by Sheilah Wells. By 1977 she was urging viewers to “give a little yodel.” The same article says she advertised pudding bars in the early 1980s before leaving the advertising, that the actor Judd Hirsch later became a television spokesman, and that the packaging moved to an Alpine look in the late 1980s. Conagra told the magazine that “Heidi,” a name sometimes given to the character, is only a nickname.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell everyday things from the grocery aisle: microwave popcorn, hot cocoa, apple juice, applesauce, orange juice and iced tea. Their packaging comes in very different forms, from flat paper bags that open out in a microwave and tins or canisters of cocoa powder to juice cartons, plastic bottles and boxes of tea bags, and each format gives a designer a different surface to work with.

A bag, a canister, a carton and a box all have to carry the same few things: a name that can be read from a distance, a picture or colour that signals the flavour, and the instructions and legal text a food label needs. How those elements share the space says a good deal about how a brand wants to be seen on the shelf.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two sales, a retro revival and a recyclable tub.

The Sanna family did not keep the brand for long after its launch. The Times and Smithsonian both report that it was sold in 1967 to Beatrice Foods, and that Beatrice was bought in 1990 by ConAgra, now Conagra Brands, which has owned Swiss Miss since then. Its website today carries a Conagra Brands copyright line, and English Wikipedia lists Universal Robina as the brand’s owner in the Philippines. Charles Sanna died on 13 March 2019 in Madison, the Times reported, citing his daughter Lucy Sanna; a month earlier he had told the Wisconsin State Journal that it was “nice to know that you’ve done something that will carry on.”

The cartoon girl has returned in pieces. According to Advertising Week, the character came back to the packaging in 2012 on limited-edition vintage canisters, and those retro canisters last appeared on shelves in 2017 and 2018. The magazine quotes Ed Griffin, who worked on them, as saying the team redesigned several past packages and made “faux-retro concepts,” and that people who remember her recall “the animated, wide-eyed version.”

The container itself has also changed. Core77 reported in September 2020 that the brand’s round canisters, made from a paper tube with a foil lining and a metal base, could not easily be separated for recycling, and that Conagra had commissioned the packaging company Berry Global to design a replacement. The new container is a tapered cube in blue with a lid and label, which the companies describe as recyclable and easier to grip, and which Berry says has a smaller carbon footprint in manufacture and transport. Core77 quotes Conagra’s aim to make all its plastic packaging renewable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.

Through these changes a few things have stayed. The name, chosen by Anthony Sanna, has stayed since 1961, and the product is still sold as a mix to stir into hot water or milk. ConAgra’s 2007 page described it as made with “a blend of rich, dark European cocoas,” which is the company’s own description.

For a design guide, Swiss Miss shows how a homely character and an imagined Alpine setting can carry a brand born in the American Midwest. Compare Orville Redenbacher’s, another Conagra brand built around a figure, and Hunt’s, also part of Conagra. For this guide we use alpine blue, cocoa brown and marshmallow cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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