Daniel Carasso

Origins and early life

Daniel Carasso was born at Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, on 16 December 1905, into the Sephardi Jewish community that had lived in the city since the expulsion from Spain; his father was Isaac Carasso.

Work and career

The family left for Barcelona, where in 1919 Isaac began selling yoghurt in pharmacies as a remedy for children's intestinal illness, using cultures from the Pasteur Institute, and named the firm Danone after his son, Danon being the Catalan diminutive of Daniel. Daniel studied commerce in Marseille and bacteriology in Paris and opened the French company, turning a chemist's remedy into an ordinary food. In 1941 he fled the German occupation for the United States, where the following year he founded Dannon Milk Products in New York, the origin of American yoghurt as a mass product; he came back to France in 1945.

He then built the group by merger, joining Gervais in 1967 and BSN in 1973, and remained its honorary president to the end. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 17 May 2009, aged 103.