An apprenticeship in a heladería, a storefront in Texas and a turn to wholesale.

Talenti is an American brand of gelato and sorbetto, sold in clear jars in supermarket freezers and owned today by The Magnum Ice Cream Company. Its story begins in Argentina. Twin Cities Business reported in August 2015 that the founder, Josh Hochschuler, made his living as a banker in Argentina before the business began, and that the owner of his favourite gelateria there took him on as an apprentice, training his palate and teaching him traditional methods of making gelato.

The Magnum Ice Cream Company’s own brand page tells the story in similar terms. It says Hochschuler was living and working in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, that he sought an apprenticeship at a heladería there, and that he learned to make what the company calls “Old World style” gelato, slowly cooking batches of ingredients together. The company presents that method as the basis of the brand today.

He brought the craft home to Texas. The company says Hochschuler opened a Talenti gelateria in Dallas in 2003, and the trade magazine Dairy Foods, reporting in December 2014, said the same: he founded Talenti as a store-front gelateria in Dallas that year. Twin Cities Business described Dallas as his hometown.

The shop did not last long. Two years into the venture, Twin Cities Business reported, Hochschuler felt the business was dictating his life. He closed the store and went into distribution, and by 2007 he was supplying restaurants and hotels exclusively. Within a year he had met the businessman Steve Gill through a college friend, and the two formed a partnership. The magazine says Gill and Hochschuler then reworked parts of the brand, including its packaging and ingredients.

By the time of its sale the company had a base in the Midwest. Food Business News described Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto in December 2014 as a Minneapolis-based maker of packaged gelato, founded in 2003, with flavours such as sea salt caramel and Sicilian pistachio. Its production was in the South: Dairy Foods reported that the company made its pints and quarts at a plant in Marietta, Georgia.

Unilever in 2014, The Magnum Ice Cream Company in 2025.

The sale came in December 2014. Dairy Foods reported on 2 December 2014 that Unilever had purchased Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto, according to a Talenti press release issued that day, and that neither side disclosed the terms. In a statement, Talenti said it would maintain and operate its production facility in Marietta. A Talenti spokeswoman told the magazine that Gill, as chief executive, would report directly to Kees Kruythoff, president of Unilever North America, and that Hochschuler would report to Gill.

Unilever had already moved into gelato that year. Dairy Foods noted that Unilever’s Breyers brand had entered the gelato category at the start of 2014 with four flavours packed in clear tubs. Food Business News listed the Unilever ice cream brands Talenti was joining, among them Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, Klondike, Magnum and Popsicle. In Unilever’s statement, as quoted by that magazine, Kruythoff singled out the packaging: the acquisition, he said, widened the company’s position in gelato “with its artisanal offerings and its clear, distinct and recyclable packaging.” Gill was quoted as saying the team was “thrilled to join the Unilever family,” and that it would work to expand distribution.

A decade later the ice cream business left Unilever. Food Ingredients First reported on 8 December 2025 that Unilever had completed the demerger of its ice cream division on 6 December, creating The Magnum Ice Cream Company, whose shares began trading in Amsterdam, with secondary listings in London and New York. The split had been announced in March 2024, the report said, and Unilever was keeping a minority stake that it planned to sell gradually. The report named Ben & Jerry’s, Cornetto, Wall’s, Breyers and Klondike among the brands of the new company.

Talenti is part of that portfolio. The Magnum Ice Cream Company lists Talenti on its corporate website, under the heading “Raise the Jar,” and links from there to the brand’s own site. The Magnum Ice Cream Company has owned Talenti since the demerger of December 2025, alongside Breyers, Klondike and Magnum itself.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit in three corners of the freezer and the baby-food shelf: bagged frozen vegetables, pints and tubs of ice cream and gelato, and food for babies sold in jars and squeeze pouches. Each of those formats asks a lot of a small surface. A frozen bag is read through frost and at a glance from an open case; an ice-cream pint is turned in the hand, its lid seen from above; a jar or pouch is bought by a parent who wants to know quickly what is inside.

Names in these categories have often started with a family, a farm or a single shop and later passed to larger food companies, sometimes more than once. A label can therefore outlast several owners, and the place on the front of a pack is not always the place where the food is now grown, churned or packed.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its food is made and how its packs and logos have changed — and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

A 2013 rebrand, a see-through container and a lid that customers fought with.

The look of the brand was reworked in 2013. Packaging Strategies reported on 22 March 2013 that Talenti was rebranding to modernise “the look and feel” of the product, with a new logo and typeface that the company said supported the brand’s simplicity and playfulness. The new mark was described as a “smiling spoon” logo, paired with an updated tagline, “Happier spoons,” and the new packaging was due to reach retailers nationwide from April 2013. It arrived alongside four new flavours, including an Alphonso Mango sorbetto and an Argentine Caramel gelato made with dulce de leche.

The constant is the jar. Writing in The Washington Post in June 2017, in an article carried by the Concord Monitor, Bonnie Benwick reported that Hochschuler figured his product would stand out in freezers full of pints because it was housed in clear plastic instead of cardboard, and that he developed the jar to replicate the look of a gelato shop display case. The jar is made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the article said, and the screw-top lid of polyethylene. Benwick described the “pint-cycling” celebrated on a Talenti Facebook page, where emptied jars were refilled with things from mosaic glass to art supplies, and Unilever told the paper the jars were used to pack office lunches and turned up as wedding decor.

The jar has its critics too. TODAY.com reported on 3 June 2025 that Talenti’s packaging — a clear jar with a dark-brown screw-top lid, inspired, according to the brand, by the way Italian gelaterias display their gelato — had long frustrated customers who struggled to open it. Talenti had posted a video in May suggesting ways to loosen the lids, the report said, and had earlier given away a jar gripper called the Talenti twist. A spokesperson told the site the company was rolling out a new lid as a short-term fix, while a team worked on a longer-term solution that would keep the clear jar.

For a design guide, Talenti shows how a container can carry a brand: a see-through jar that puts the product on display like a shop counter, closed with a dark lid and signed with a spoon that smiles. Compare Breyers, which entered gelato under Unilever in the year Talenti was sold, and Ben & Jerry’s, a fellow brand at The Magnum Ice Cream Company. For this guide we use lid espresso, mango, gelato cream and pistachio with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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