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Danone makes and sells everyday dairy products, plant-based foods, bottled water, and specialized nutrition for babies and medical patients.
Danone is one of the world's biggest food companies, and its business is built on things people consume every day: yogurt, milk, plant-based drinks, bottled water, baby formula, and nutrition products for people who are sick or recovering. You'll find its brands in grocery aisles almost everywhere — Activia and Oikos yogurt, Alpro soy and oat drinks, Evian and Volvic water, and Aptamil baby formula. Roughly half of its sales come from dairy and plant-based products, with the rest split between waters and specialized nutrition.
The company is split into three main parts, and each works a little differently. The dairy and plant-based arm is the biggest, selling yogurt and milk alternatives mostly through supermarkets, where Danone owns the shelf space and earns a small margin on enormous volumes. The waters business sells bottled water, which sounds simple but is a logistics game — water is heavy and cheap, so you have to make it near where people drink it. The specialized nutrition unit sells baby formula and medical nutrition, which are higher-margin products often recommended by doctors and hospitals, giving Danone a stickier relationship with customers than a tub of yogurt does. Danone's real edge is brand trust. Shoppers reach for Activia or Evian without thinking, and that habit is worth a lot; a company can't easily build it from scratch. But that strength cuts both ways. Food retail is a brutal, low-margin business, and powerful supermarket chains push back hard on prices. Danone also faces a slow-growing, wealthy market in Europe and North America where people are eating less dairy and more plant-based food, which is exactly why it has poured money into Alpro and its other plant-based brands. In developing countries, the opposite is true — rising incomes mean more people buying branded yogurt and water, so those markets are where a lot of the future growth has to come from.
After the First World War, a man named Isaac Carasso saw something most people missed: a Nobel Prize winner's research had suggested that the bacteria in yogurt might be good for human health. So he set up a small workshop in Barcelona and started making the stuff, naming it Danone after his son's nickname. Because it was sold in pharmacies as a medicine rather than a snack, yogurt became something people trusted. That trust would stick to the brand for a century.
By the 1970s, Danone was no longer flying solo; it had been folded into a big French food group called BSN. Then, in 1973, BSN merged with Gervais Danone, and the man behind the deal, Antoine Riboud, took charge. The combined company instantly became France's biggest food manufacturer and a serious player across Europe. This is where Danone stopped being a yogurt maker and became a food empire.
For two decades the parent company was still called BSN, which meant almost nothing outside France and was already used by other firms elsewhere. So in 1994, the group did something simple but smart: it took the name of its most famous brand and became Groupe Danone. A new logo showed a child reaching for a star, a little symbol of ambition. The company was now betting its identity on the yogurt brand it had built.
In 1996, the founder's son, Franck Riboud, replaced his father Antoine as CEO. This was a handover from one generation to the next, and it set the company on a new path: focusing on health and healthy eating. Under Franck, Danone pushed harder into international markets. The health angle that started in a Barcelona pharmacy was now the official strategy.
Danone made its biggest bet yet in 2007: it agreed to buy Numico, a Dutch company that made baby food and clinical nutrition, for over 12 billion euros. That deal made Danone the world's second-largest baby food maker. To pay for it, Danone sold its biscuit division to Kraft Foods for around 5 billion euros. In one move, the company trimmed the snacks and doubled down on dairy, water, and nutrition. This was a company deciding what it wanted to be when it grew up.
A decade later, Danone made another big bet, acquiring WhiteWave, the company behind the Alpro brand, and jumping into plant-based food and drinks. This was a new growth avenue at a time when more people were questioning dairy. Danone also launched a slogan, 'One Planet. One Health,' linking human health with the health of the planet. The pharmacy medicine had become a health-and-sustainability brand.
In 2021, an activist hedge fund called Bluebell Capital went after CEO Emmanuel Faber, arguing the stock was disappointing and the company had lost its way. Faber was out by mid-March after weak results. The board then named Antoine Bernard de Saint-Affrique as the next CEO, starting in September. A century-old company had just been reminded that public markets can be impatient.
Once in the job, the new CEO, Antoine de Saint-Affrique, launched a plan called Renew Danone to get back to sustainable, profitable growth. It involved resetting the culture, the way the company executed, and even its financial model. Danone also became more disciplined about managing its portfolio of businesses. The company was effectively admitting the previous era had drifted and promising to steer straight.
In 2026, Singapore's food agency recalled some of Danone's infant formula over potential contamination, and the stock fell more than 8 percent in a single day. That was the worst one-day drop since Danone listed on the stock market in 1989. The recall also reminded investors of a deeper worry: birth rates in China, a key market for baby nutrition, were falling. A company built on health had a new problem to solve.
The company has also been through a messy stretch. Its shares took a hit after the 2022 decision to sell off its Russian business and the costly 2023 restructuring that followed, and it has been working to cut costs and refocus on its strongest brands. Danone pays a steady dividend, and it has used share buybacks to return cash to investors too. It recently sold its U.S. organic dairy business to focus on its core brands. None of this is glamorous — Danone is a slow, steady consumer staples company, not a rocket ship — but that is the point: it sells things people eat and drink no matter what the economy is doing.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026
Health, not taste, is the top reason people choose plant-based dairy, Danone's global survey finds
Danone asked 42,000 adults in 14 countries why they buy plant-based milk and yoghurt, and 42% named health first. Taste came in behind, at 35%. For a company whose biggest business is dairy and plant-based products, that is encouraging: Alpro and Silk sell on feeling good, not just flavour. Within the health group, a quarter pointed to gut health. Source: Green Queen Media, reporting Danone's survey in Food Quality and Preference, data from 2026