Isaac Carasso

Encyclopedia : I : IS : ISA : Isaac Carasso

Isaac Carasso was an oil merchant of Jewish Sephardic origin. He was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, then known as Selanik. His Turkified name was Izak Karasu, with Karasu meaning "Black Water" in Turkish. He changed his name back to Isaac Carasso when his family migrated to Spain. He was from a very prominent Jewish family, and his uncle Emanuel Karasu was the Selanik congressman in the Ottoman parliament. Emanuel Karasu formed the first Masonic lodge in Thessaloniki and pioneered the mason movement within the Ottoman Empire.[link]

In 1912 with the political unrest in the Balkans, Carasso decided to move his family to Barcelona, Spain. After setting up his medical facility, he noticed that he was getting a lot of young patients with digestive and intestinal problems. Carasso soon recalled that such health conditions were treated with yogurt back in his old home. Since yogurt was not a well known nutrient in those days throughout Western Europe, he had to sell it as a medicine through the pharmacies initially.

He founded the Dannon Company in 1919 when he opened a small yogurt business named "Danone" a variation on the Catalan nickname of his son, Daniel. [link] Carasso, who spent his early years in what is now modern Greece, perfected the first industrial process for making yogurt, mixing modern science with traditional Greek and Turkish recipes.[link]

Daniel Carasso took over the family business in Spain and established Danone in France in 1929. During World War II Daniel Carasso immigrated to the United States and in 1942 founded the first American yogurt company. The younger Carasso Americanized the name to Dannon Milk Products, Inc., in the Bronx, NY. Isaac Carasso died in France.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.