Isaac Carasso - Biography

Isaac Carasso (1874 – April 19, 1939) was a Spanish doctor and member of the prominent Sephardic Jewish Carasso family of Ottoman Selanik (modern Thessaloniki, Greece). He went on to found a yoghurt factory which became Groupe Danone. He was the nephew of Emanuel Karasu, the Ottoman politician.

Carasso was born in Selanik in 1874. In 1912, with the unrest of the Balkan Wars and the approach of Greek troops, he moved his family to Barcelona where he changed his name to Isaac Carasso.

After setting up his medical facility, he noticed that he had many young patients with digestive and intestinal problems. Inspired by the work of Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, who had popularized sour milk as a health food, and recalling that such health conditions were treated with yogurt in the Balkans, he imported cultures from Bulgaria or used "pure cultures that had been isolated in Paris" at Mechnikov's laboratory at the Institut Pasteur. Since yogurt was not well known then in Western Europe, he initially sold it as a medicine, through pharmacies.

He founded the company which would become Groupe Danone in 1919 when he opened a small yogurt business named "Danone", a variation on the Catalan nickname of his son, Daniel. Carasso perfected the first industrial process for making yogurt.

His son Daniel Carasso took over the family business in Spain and established Danone in France and the United States (Dannon).

Isaac Carasso died in France in 1939.