Daniel Carasso

Daniel Carasso ( born December 16, 1905 in Thessaloniki, † 17 May, 2009, Paris) was a French entrepreneur of Jewish- Sephardic ancestry. Daniel Carasso was a member of Carasso family, son of Isaac Carasso, who founded the yogurt maker Danone, Dannon Company established its U.S. subsidiary, and built Danone is a global company.

Biography

Carassos family had lived for centuries in Salonica in the Ottoman Empire, which now Thessaloniki, Greece. 1912, after the Balkan wars, the family emigrated to Barcelona. In 1919, Carassos father to market a yogurt, which he named after Daniel, whose Catalan nickname Danon was.

1923 Carasso went to Marseille, where he went to business school, and later to Paris, where he studied bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute. In 1939 he took over the family business and founded a subsidiary in France. In 1941, he was forced to flee the Nazi occupation and settled in the United States in New York.

In 1942 he formed a partnership with two friends of the family, Joseph Metzger, a Spanish businessman of Swiss origin, and his son Juan. They bought a small company called Oxy - Gala, the Greek yoghurt produced, and formed from the Dannon Milk Products, based in the Bronx. Since 1947, he continued his yogurt as a nod to American tastes to jam and managed thereby to achieve greater sales numbers in a broad market. Later, the company's activities expanded to other foods such as cheese and Danone was a leading global food manufacturers.

1951 Carasso returned back to France. Carasso died 103 years old at his home in Paris.