The career of Charles Sanna, the inventor of Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa, who died this March in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, sheds light on a hidden corner of the dairy business. It is a niche occupied by Italian Americans. The entrepreneur, who was 101 when he died, was the son of Anthony R. Sanna, a Sicilian immigrant who founded the Sanna Dairy Engineers company in 1935.

Charles, who had studied mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, was an ingenious worker in the family business. Faced with a huge surplus of leftover coffee creamer the dairy produced for the military during the Korean War, he had an inventive solution. The powder, Sanna surmised, “would make an excellent ingredient for a hot cup of cocoa,” according to The New York Times. “I consulted the family cookbook and determined the best proportions of creamer, sugar, cocoa, and vanilla. The lab promptly came up with the finished product.”

Charles’s brother, Anthony, originally named the item Brown Swiss, the Switzerland cattle breed. It was actually made with milk from Holsteins. Brown Miss, which the dairy sold in pre-measured envelopes to airlines and restaurants, faced an early hurdle. Restaurant patrons, The New York Times obituary pointed out, frequently walked away with the packages.

Using less expensive non-fat milk powder, which gave the product a longer shelf life, the company began targeting supermarkets and other retailers. It was rebranded in 1961 as Swiss Miss, a name, The Washington Post notes, brother Anthony took from the title of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Mail order Swiss Miss dolls, sold for three dollars and a box top, helped promote the product.

It was marketed as the country’s first instant hot chocolate drink that could be made with water rather than milk. Now owned by Conagra, Swiss Miss is still made at the original plant in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

The story of Swiss Miss leads back to Charles’s immigrant father, Anthony, who founded the dairy business. An artisan who made his own ricotta and mozzarella, he also appreciated the virtues of technology. Anthony, whose plant manufactured evaporated milk, devised a technique for drying milk. He passed it on to his sons, who used it in the mid-1940s to develop Sanalac, reputedly the first instant dry milk on the market. The family patriarch’s ingenuity paved the way for Swiss Miss.