Nostalgia for the foods consumed in childhood is a phenomenon extensively documented by food studies scholars and exploited by marketers around the world. This article traces the evolution of the Soviet children's soft drink Buratino from its origins in the Brezhnev era through a variety of post-Soviet incarnations. The character featured on the label, drawn from A. N. Tolstoy's 1935 book based on Carlo Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio , is both instantly recognizable and remarkably protean in nature, combining the archetype of the trickster from the original literary text with a more benign representative of Soviet values depicted in a 1975 film adaptation. Using Douglas Holt's premises in his book How Brands Become Icons (2004), I argue that what would seem like an easy transition from literary character to advertising icon is complicated by the limitations of nostalgia-based marketing, changing consumer perceptions, and lack of clarity in trademark law. The article concludes with an analysis of the marketing strategy of the Kazakh company Caspian Beverage Holding, which has been singularly successful in recognizing the potential power of the brand and adapting it to a new, post-Soviet market.

Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female, expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.