SanTásti, what does it mean and where did it come from? This is a question we get all the time and I figured it warranted a solid answer for those who are curious. 

Anyone who as ever tried to name a business, brand or product knows how hard it is. It’s like naming a child – you don’t want people making fun of your baby on the playground. It’s very difficult to find an original and appropriate name that isn’t taken. The last thing you want is to get sued by Coke as soon as you’ve developed some good will and recognition behind your brand.

With a product focused on cleansing/cleaning and reviving/revitalizing, we faced a lot of challenges in coming up with a name that didn’t sound like a kitchen and bathroom cleaner or a new pharmaceutical drug.  Time after time, the names we felt were appropriate were taken.

Needless to say Nicole and I spent a lot of our Innovation Quest money on lawyers telling us we might get sued if we used some of our first names for what is known today as SanTásti.  This was a frustrating and expensive process that inspired us to just make up a word.

SanTásti came from a list of words that we felt were related to the product. We combined “sense” and “taste” to get “SenTasti.” We bounced it around a few people and one of our family members suggested “SanTasti.” We liked it…  we felt like it had two meanings that would be picked up:

• One of these meanings is, as you guessed, ”without taste” with a twist on the French word “sans.”
• The other meaning stems from a more Latin root of “san” giving “whole taste.” 

We like this name so much because it explains how our classic beverage tastes (flavorless, as to not impair your next tasting) as well as what it does for your palate (gives you the whole experience). We also liked how the domain name was available and the lawyers Okayed it.

We later added the accent to help with the pronunciation. For those of you who are still uncertain on how to pronounce SanTásti, click here.

With all of this information and the green light to go ahead with “SanTásti” we still couldn’t make the decision. We knew we only had one shot at it and we didn’t want to mess it up. The old saying of “paralysis by analysis” definitely held true as we found ourselves unable to commit to a name. 

Confused and without conviction, Nicole and I took a walk through downtown SLO to clear our heads and come up with our answer… and that’s when we saw this.

Serendipity?  Coincidence?  Some sort of cosmic joke? Either way we took it as a sign and decided to just go for it.

As someone who has gone through the process, my advice is to pick a name and get going. Think about what Shakespeare said… “A rose by any other name.” Meaning –what matters is what something is, not what it is called.

Today I’m very happy with SanTásti. It’s a great name for our palate cleansing beverage. The response we generally get when we share some of our earlier names is consistent. People can’t imagine SanTásti being called anything else.