La Serenísima

Development

Italian immigrant Antonino Mastellone, a cheese-maker from Sardinia who arrived in Argentina in 1925, started producing mozzarella and ricotta in his home of General Rodríguez, a pampas city west of Buenos Aires. Mastellone delivered the products himself to Buenos Aires by train, selling it in La Boca, Barracas, and San Telmo neighborhoods, where most part of Italian immigrants had settled and were consumers of those cheeses.

Antonino Mastellone married Teresa Aiello on October 26, 1929, and that date was set as the official for the establishment of the company. Mastellone brought his first delivery truck in 1935, and incorporated the company in 1942; Mastellone named his venture in honor of La Serenissima, a World War I-era Italian Air Force battalion which on orders to bombard Vienna, released a load of fliers urging peace, instead. The battalion itself had been named for the medieval Republic of Venice, which was widely known as La Serenissima (though the word also translates as the "most serene," or peaceful).

By 1960, the company had become one of the few in Argentina which mass-produced pasteurized milk, allowing it to sell the product year-round. Establishing its own research laboratory in 1964, La Serenísima became the first in Argentina to provide nutritional facts on each bottle. In 1978, Mastellone Hnos. acquired rights to brand name La Martona, which having been established in 1889, was the first dairy company of Argentina. La Martona had ceased operations in 1978, after it was declared bankruptcy due to its debts. Nevertheless, Mastellone Hnos. did not market La Martona products until 2019, when it released an economic line of milk.

The company pioneered the sale of lactose-free milk in Argentina in 1984, became the market leader in the sale of yogurt (whose local consumption more than doubled between 1983 and 1988) and introduced cultured milk locally, in 1988. La Serenísima also introduced large-scale organic dairy farming in Argentina, in 1994, and became the first to fortify its products with iron sulfate.

Expanding its products

In 1994, La Serenísima began selling not-from-concentrate, perishable juices through a joint venture with Tropicana, then owned by Seagram. The partnership combined La Serenísima's distribution network for chilled products with Tropicana's juice business. The venture was formed by Pascual Mastellone and Mike Harbison, of Tropicana, and later ended after Tropicana was acquired by PepsiCo.

The company entered into a joint venture with French retail foods group Danone in 1996 for the manufacture, sale and distribution of yogurt and desserts under the La Serenísima brand. It continued to develop products for the local market, including phytosterol-enriched milk in 2000, juices for infants in 2001, and linoleic acid-enriched milk in 2003. It also became more active in public service efforts, such as the establishment of an environmental impact bureau in 2002 and a fund-raising effort for the non-profit Favaloro Foundation in 2003.

La Serenísima processed more than 4.8 million tons of milk annually by the early 2000s. Through Danone, it introduced Activia to the Argentine market in 2005. In June 2009, Danone reportedly entered into talks to acquire 100% of Mastellone Hermanos S.A., La Serenísima's parent company, although Mastellone's debt, reported at US$260 million, and opposition attributed to former President Néstor Kirchner complicated the negotiations. During the 2010s, the company launched additional products in alliance with Grupo Danone and Cabrales, as well as other dairy-derived products produced by the company.

In 2019, La Serenísima added La Armonía to its line of lower-priced brands, marketing milk and dulce de leche under the Armonía name. Armonía products alternated in the market with La Martona as La Serenísima's economy products.

The following is a list containing the products manufactured and commercialized by Mastellone. This chart also include the other brands of the group.