Two butchers, a margarine town and a 1937 brand name.

Unox is a Dutch brand of smoked sausage, soup and winter food, and its roots are in Oss, in the province of North Brabant. Oss became an industrial town from 1871, when the margarine and butter makers Van den Bergh and Jurgens set up there, the regional broadcaster Omroep Brabant reported in 2024. The brand’s own history names two butchers’ businesses as its foundations: one opened in Oss by the Zwanenberg family in 1850, and one founded by the Hartog family in 1876. Hartog grew into Hartogs Vleeschfabrieken, a meat-processing business, Dutch Wikipedia says, and the two firms built factories side by side along the railway in Oss; Omroep Brabant says the little street between them was nicknamed the “Concurrentiestraatje,” the competition lane.

The margarine companies became the Margarine Unie in 1927 and merged with Lever Brothers in 1929 to form Unilever, Omroep Brabant reported. Hartog had been taken over by the Margarine Unie, and in 1937 its meat business was given a new brand name: Unox. How the name was chosen is not settled even by the company. Its history page offers two stories: that someone combined Unilever, Oss and “ox,” English for the animal, or that the name came out of a competition among staff. Omroep Brabant gives a version of the first, Unilever plus ox.

The first products under the name were Gelderse rookworsten, smoked sausages made at the Unox factory in Oss, Dutch Wikipedia says, with blood sausage and other sausages added two years later. Unox says its knakworstjes, thin frankfurter-style sausages whose first pack said “knax,” have been on sale since 1953. Hartog, under the Unox name, and Zwanenberg, under the Zwan name, merged their meat businesses only in the 1970s, according to Omroep Brabant.

Soup in a tin, a dive and an orange hat.

Soup came twenty years after sausage. Unox says its first canned soup, a tomato soup, reached shops in 1957, after long testing to make sure it tasted the same after reheating, and that the cook of the first kettle was Th. van der Leest, who had worked for Hartog since 1922. Sales were slow, and in 1961 the company tried a blunt remedy: it handed out 2.9 million free cans of soup to Dutch households, by its own account and Dutch Wikipedia’s. Unox says its market share then rose to 67 percent.

Since then the brand has tied itself to the Dutch winter. The company says the Nieuwjaarsduik, the New Year’s Day dive into the sea at Scheveningen, started in 1960 as a joke among eight people and was later adopted by Unox; around 10,000 people now go into the water at noon on 1 January, the company says, followed by a bowl of pea soup. English Wikipedia, citing the municipality of The Hague, says Unox sponsors the dive and hands out orange knit caps and pea soup, and Dutch Wikipedia describes the hats and gloves as orange, red and blue. The brand also sponsors speed-skating events, including championships, Dutch Wikipedia says.

The hat itself began on the ice. In 1997, the company says, Unox handed out coffee, tea, hot chocolate and free pea soup to skaters and volunteers at the Dokkum rest point of the Elfstedentocht, the Frisian skating tour, and introduced the Unox hat there; it says the hats were seen all along the route. For the royal wedding of 2 February 2002 it gave an orange sleeping bag with an ermine collar, the “Damslaper,” to people who waited overnight for a place on Dam Square in Amsterdam. A 2010 article in the advertising magazine Verse Reclame described the link between Unox and the Elfstedentocht as an “invented tradition.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food and drink names from the Netherlands and Ireland: Calvé, Duyvis, Chocomel, Unox, Odlums, Club Orange and Brennans. Dutch and Irish food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal, snack or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made 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 products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A factory sold, then a brand.

Unilever separated Unox from its factory first. In 2017 it agreed to sell its meat and soup plant in Oss to the Zwanenberg Food Group, a family-owned food company based in Almelo. The regional newspaper Brabants Dagblad reported in July 2017 that the brands and recipes would stay with Unilever, which would keep marketing and sales, and Omroep Brabant dates Zwanenberg’s ownership of the factory to 2018. Zwanenberg had already bought the former Zwanenberg factories in Oss, with the Zwan brand, from Unilever in 1996, Dutch Wikipedia says, and had made some Unox and Zwan products for Unilever since 2004, according to Omroep Brabant.

On 18 December 2024 Unilever announced that it would sell the Unox and Zwan brands to Zwanenberg, the Dutch broadcaster NOS and the news site DutchNews reported. Unilever said it would keep Unox’s Cup-a-Soup and instant noodles, which fit its focus on small meals, while the meat and soup lines would go. Heiko Schipper, president of Unilever Foods, called it a “difficult decision,” citing the brand’s association with the New Year’s dive at Scheveningen and with skating. The deal then went to the Dutch competition authority, the ACM. On 5 June 2025 the ACM decided that the takeover needed a permit, saying Zwanenberg might gain too strong a negotiating position with supermarkets, which could mean higher prices for products such as smoked sausage; the companies applied for that permit on 4 July 2025. At that stage Unox was still a Unilever brand.

The name is shared with an unrelated company: UNOX, a maker of commercial ovens, has no connection with the Dutch food brand.

For a design guide, Unox shows how a sausage and soup brand can attach itself to a season, with an orange hat, a bowl of pea soup and events on ice and in the sea carrying the brand as much as any pack. Compare Knorr, Unilever’s soup and stock brand, and HAK, the Dutch vegetable brand built on the glass jar. For this guide we use hat orange, signal red and winter navy with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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