A mother’s jam business and a son who took it on.

Watt’s began as a family kitchen business making jam. The company’s own history dates its start to 1941, when, it says, Watt’s was born as a family firm belonging to the Watt family, making and selling home-made jams. Spanish Wikipedia gives the year as 1938 and names the founder as Nelly Styles de Watt, saying the business traded as Watt’s “Home Made Jams and Marmalades.”

The founder’s son carried the business forward. In May 2005 the business section of El Mercurio, Economía y Negocios, described how Roy Watt Styles had received the small jam-making company from his mother, Nelly Styles, more than half a century earlier, and reported on his visit to the company’s Lonquén plant after some 30 years without any contact with the firm he had seen grow. Spanish Wikipedia says Roy Watt Styles joined in 1945, later took charge, and towards the end of the 1950s introduced fruit juices packed in bottles under the name Néctar Watt’s, which it describes as the first of their kind in Chile; it adds that the company became a sociedad anónima during the 1960s as new partners came in.

The jam and the nectar have remained the brand’s two pillars. In the same 2005 article, the group’s then general manager, Rodolfo Véliz, said Watt’s held first place in Chile in jams and in juices and nectars, as well as in margarines and cooking oils — a ranking given by the company, not by an independent survey.

Oils, dairy and a shared juice company.

From the 1970s the Watt’s name sat inside a much larger business. The company says the Larraín family became linked to the businesses that now make up Watt’s S.A. in that decade, when it bought INAL and Industrias Coia, two makers of cooking oils and margarines with brands such as La Danesa, La Sureña, La Reina and Belmont. In 1980 it bought Loncoleche, and the following year the Osorno dairy cooperative CALO, taking it into milk. El Mercurio described Watt’s in 2005 as a food holding linked to the businessman Fernando Larraín Peña, and noted that until September 2004 the vineyard Viña Santa Carolina, founded in 1875 and the oldest business in the group, had been the holding company over all of Watt’s operations.

Juice is now shared with a brewer. In December 2006, the company says, after a commercial relationship of more than 27 years, Watt’s S.A. and CCU, through its subsidiary Ecusa, signed a joint venture to make and sell fruit nectars, juices, fruit drinks and dairy drinks, forming a new company, Promarca, owned in equal parts by the two. Watt’s says the aim of the partnership is to build the Watt’s, Yogu Yogu and Shake Shake brands, and in 2009 Promarca bought the fruit-drink brand Frugo. Spanish Wikipedia lists Watt’s among CCU’s juice brands, in shared ownership, and says Watt’s nectars are also made by CCU’s partners in Paraguay and Uruguay.

The brand also travels beyond Chile. The company says it set up Watt’s Alimentos Paraguay at the end of 1995 to make juices in Tetra Pak cartons, and in 2009 sold its production assets there to Bebidas del Paraguay. In Peru it holds a minority stake in the dairy and food company Laive, bought from 1998 and run through a shareholders’ pact with a local partner; Watt’s lists Watt’s among the brands Laive sells there.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Colombia or Chile: Alpina, Zenú, Corona, Águila, Soprole, Colún and Watt’s. Colombian and Chilean food and drink 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 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 or moment 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 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 listed company, several plants and a long run of brand purchases.

Watt’s S.A. is an open stock company listed in Santiago, with its head office and a plant in San Bernardo in the Santiago metropolitan area; the company says its San Bernardo offices date from the 1970s. Its growth since the 1990s has come largely through purchases. The company lists the fresh-pasta maker Il Gastronómico in 1995; the Chef and Cristal oil brands from Unilever Bestfoods Chile in 2004, followed by Astra and Palmín in 2007; the canned-fruit and vegetable brands Wasil and Regimel in 2010; Lácteos Valdivia in 2012; and the frozen-fruit producer Frutos del Maipo in 2014. In 2017, it says, it took control of all of Danone Chile’s assets, including a plant in Chillán and the Calán brand, and signed a long-term licence to use the Activia, Danone and Danone Light names.

Where things are made follows that history. The company says it built a new dairy plant at Lonquén in 2005, closing its plant at Loncoche, and later added lines there for canned goods in Tetra Recart cartons in 2011 and 2013; it invested in a drying tower and cheese plant at Osorno in 2008, moved yogurt lines from Lonquén to Chillán in 2018, and in 2019 began packing Loncoleche liquid milk at Osorno. It also opened a sales office in Shanghai in 2008 to support exports to Asia.

For a design guide, Watt’s shows how a founder’s surname, first written on jars of home-made jam, can stretch to cover nectars in cartons and a whole listed food group. Compare Bonne Maman, the French jam brand built on a home-made look, Jumex, the Mexican nectar maker, and the Chilean dairy names Soprole and Colún. For this guide we use a jam red, a nectar gold and an orchard green with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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