A chicory works, a stoneware pot and a merger.

Thomy is usually filed as a Basel brand, but its mustard began in Langenthal, in the canton of Bern. According to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, a firm called Oppliger & Geiser had processed chicory there, the root then roasted as a coffee substitute, since 1860. In 1894 it was taken over by Johann Friedrich Thomi and Karl Meister, and in 1901 it was renamed Helvetia.

In 1907 Helvetia began making mustard. German Wikipedia says it was sold as “Langenthaler Senf”, loose, from stoneware pots, and calls it the first industrially made table mustard on the Swiss market.

The Basel side of the story is older in coffee than in mustard. The German chicory company Franck opened a factory in Basel in 1884, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says. In 1930 Friedrich Thomi’s son Hans Thomi merged Helvetia with Basel’s Heinrich Franck Söhne AG to form Thomi + Franck, based in Basel.

The brand name dates from the same year. In 1930 the trademark “Thomy’s Senf” was registered, and German Wikipedia, citing Nestlé, says the “i” of the family name was changed to a “y”, and an English-style possessive added, to make the mark more suitable for international use and more attractive to the eye. Nestlé itself dates the brand to 1930. The spelling is the reason the family is Thomi and the brand is Thomy.

A mascot followed quickly. German Wikipedia says the “Senf-Thomy” character was chosen in 1931 after a competition and a survey of customers, and that the figure later took the shape of a tube.

The aluminium tube, then mayonnaise.

The packaging is what made Thomy’s name. In 1934 the company began selling its mild mustard in an aluminium tube, which Nestlé describes as “a world innovation” and which German Wikipedia, citing the Swiss trade site foodnews.ch, calls the first mustard sold in an aluminium tube. German Wikipedia says the format’s success lay in keeping the mustard fresh for several months, and that the original mild recipe is still made in barely changed form; other mustards have joined it since.

The tube then carried a second product. Thomi + Franck launched mayonnaise in tubes in 1951, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says; Nestlé names it “Mayonnaise à la française”. The dictionary adds vinegar from 1966, the coffee additive Franck Aroma from 1930 and the coffee extract Incarom from 1957, a reminder that the company made coffee products and condiments side by side.

Thomi + Franck also grew by buying. It acquired the Berna vinegar factory in 1965 and the Leisi bakery business in 1969, according to the dictionary.

The brand was advertised with posters in the Swiss tradition. The Basel poster collection holds historic posters for Thomi + Franck, and German Wikipedia illustrates the brand with a 1947 poster for “Thomy’s Senf” by the Swiss graphic artist Emil Alfred Neukomm. In Germany, where Thomy products have been made and sold since 1954, the brand advertised in the 1960s with the sung slogan “Delikat nach Schweizer Art”, delicate in the Swiss style, German Wikipedia says; its later television jingle borrowed the melody of the jazz song “My Baby Just Cares for Me”, which Nina Simone recorded in 1958.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make mustard, and they come from four countries: Maille, Colman’s, Amora, Edmond Fallot, Develey, Thomy and Löwensenf, from France, Britain, Germany and Switzerland. Mustard brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialist shop to a supermarket shelf.

A mustard brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a name and the table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its mustard is actually milled and packed.

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

Two stages into Nestlé, and fewer factories.

Thomy became a Nestlé brand in two steps. In 1971 the Franck share of Thomi + Franck passed to Nestlé through Ursina-Franck, the Bern dairy and food group Nestlé bought that year, the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says. The Thomi family went on running the company until 1989, when, lacking a successor, it handed over the management and its 49% minority stake to Nestlé.

Where Thomy is made has changed with time. In Germany, Thomy had a plant in Karlsruhe from 1954 to 2001, the newspaper nd reported in 2001, and one in Neuss from 1956. In 2025 Nestlé announced it would close the Neuss plant, with about 145 jobs, citing rising costs, falling volumes and overcapacity, Lebensmittel Praxis reported; most of the tube production of mustard and mayonnaise moved to Nestlé’s plant in Lüdinghausen in Münsterland, where the company invested €13 million, according to the IHK Nord Westfalen. Nestlé said it aimed to keep making about 80% of Thomy products at its German sites. The Westfälischer Anzeiger reported the Neuss closure in June 2026. German Wikipedia adds that Thomy products are also made at Nestlé’s Biessenhofen plant in the Allgäu.

Basel remains the home site. In November 2022 Nestlé signed a contract to sell part of the old Thomi + Franck grounds, the Basler Zeitung reported, and said Thomy mustard and mayonnaise would continue to be made on the part it kept.

Swiss rules have also changed the pack. Under the “Swissness” legislation that took effect in 2017, a food may show the Swiss cross only if most of its raw materials are Swiss; Swiss press reported in 2016 that Thomy mayonnaise was among some 80 Nestlé products losing the cross, partly because Swiss egg production could not supply the volume needed, according to those reports. In 2019 Nestlé added three “Super-Mayos” made with avocado, hemp and almond oils.

For a design guide, Thomy shows how a package, a family name respelled for export and a tube-shaped mascot can carry a condiment for nearly a century. Compare Cailler, another Swiss brand in Nestlé’s hands, and Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise from the rival Unilever camp. For this guide we use a tube red, a mild-mustard yellow and an aluminium grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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