It is very difficult to find a unique name for a company because there are already so many companies around. We originally wanted to use some variation on "UTZ" (our founders' last name) but all the reasonable variations we devised were already in use.

Our next thought was to make up a completely new name of the form consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant (a pattern another company found highly successful); so we made a spreadsheet of all possible letter combinations of that form. It turns out there are 333,396 such combinations (if you treat 'Y' as both a consonant and a vowel). Eliminating all such names already in use, all names sounding like profanity and all names containing barnyard animals still left us with over 300,000 names to sift through. That did not look like a very enjoyable task so we set the spreadsheet aside.

Next, we considered combining the two approaches: making up a name by interspersing letters within the name "UTZ". After a little experminentation we realized that it worked better if we spelled "UTZ" backwards. So we made a new spreadsheet with all combinations of the form 'Z'-vowel-'T'-letter-'U'-consonant, still using 'Y' as both a vowel and a consonant. There are only 3,276 such combinations, many of which were easy to eliminate as unpronouncable. We chose "Zytrus" because we liked the sound of the word best. It isn't truly a new word, however; it is an archaic German word for "citrus".