MIDAC Brand Guidelines: The Soave Battery Maker Born From a Tanning Family

A tanning family’s battery division in Soave.

MIDAC is an Italian battery maker based in Soave, in the province of Verona. The company dates its start to 1989: its history page says the first brick was laid on 15 November 1989 in Soave, which is still its main production site. The name is an acronym, the company explains, for Mastrotto Industrie Divisione Accumulatori, the accumulator division of the Mastrotto industries.

The founder the company credits is Santo Mastrotto, who it says came to batteries after more than thirty years in leather tanning with the Gruppo Mastrotto. Another page of the company’s site describes MIDAC as founded by the brothers Santo and Bruno Mastrotto. Trade press agrees on the core of the story: Warehouse News wrote in December 2012 that Midac SpA was formed in Italy in 1989, and HeavyQuip Magazine reported in March 2021 that Midac Batteries Spa was founded by Santo Mastrotto and was then led by Filippo Girardi as president and chief executive.

According to the company’s own timeline, the years from 1989 to 1992 covered the founding and the start of production of lead-acid starter and traction batteries. Stationary batteries followed in 2001, the same year it lists the opening of MIDAC Deutschland. A second Italian factory, in Cremona, has been controlled from Soave since 2008, the company says, and makes starter batteries.

Starter, traction and standby.

MIDAC works across three families of lead-acid battery, which the company names as starter, traction and stationary, and it added lithium in 2016, according to its timeline. On its current site the range is grouped into automotive, industrial mobility, energy storage and charging. Automotive covers cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles and leisure vehicles, sold under the MIDAC name and under the marks Energeco, Unienergy and Eco Safe Power. Industrial mobility covers material handling, agriculture and construction, cleaning machines, lifting platforms, marine use and light towers.

The forklift range is the core of the industrial side. The company lists lead-acid traction batteries in DIN and British Standard formats under the MDL and MBS names, citing the standards EN 60254-1/2 and EN 62485-3; a low-maintenance MLM system paired with its own MIDATRON HE chargers and a battery module; heavy-duty versions called MHE and HDD; Force Block batteries for light motive power such as cleaning machines and compact pallet trucks; and a lithium-ion motive power battery run by what it calls the MBMS, the Midac Battery Management System. Energy storage covers residential, commercial and industrial systems, critical power and telecom, and the charging line includes a product called Hypercharger.

The company also describes how it makes its batteries. It says its lead batteries are made almost entirely from recycled lead, and that the Soave site generates its own power with a photovoltaic plant and a trigenerator. These are the company’s own statements.

How industrial battery makers present themselves.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

From an Italian division to a European network.

From Soave, MIDAC built a sales network abroad. Its timeline lists MIDAC France in 2004, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in 2011 and 2012, Australia in 2014 and a Nordic company in 2017, alongside Italian branches in Civitanova Marche, Pomezia and Budrio. The British arm came through a partnership: Warehouse News reported in December 2012 that Midac and Total Battery Management, a UK forklift battery-room specialist formed in 2007, had joined forces early that year to create Midac UK, with a further operation serving Ireland. The magazine said the British company would sell batteries, chargers, ancillaries and service, and design battery rooms ranging from simple battery-change beds to mechanised multi-level battery-change systems for forklift fleets.

The company lists its foreign subsidiaries as MIDAC France in Guebwiller; MIDAC UK in Oswestry; MIDAC Nederland; MIDAC Nordic in Kungsängen; and MIDAC Australia. Soave, it says, remains the production centre for starter, traction and standby batteries, while Cremona makes starter batteries.

The largest recent step concerns lithium. In February 2021 Il Sole 24 Ore reported that Midac Batteries Spa was among the participants in the second Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) on next-generation batteries, and that three projects would give Italy its first integrated lithium battery plant, split between Soave and Cremona. The newspaper described the three strands as the sorting and recovery of batteries at the end of their life, a new cell production plant, and battery-management electronics, in a plan running over seven years. HeavyQuip Magazine added in March 2021 that Midac was one of 42 European companies selected, and that recycling work would involve partners including Enel X. The company now says it is one of 60 European firms in the EuBatIn project. In 2024 it launched a product it calls “In One,” according to its timeline.

For a design guide, MIDAC shows how a battery maker from a small Italian town presents starter, traction and storage products under one acronym, with a family founding story and a European branch network behind it. Compare Exide and EnerSys. For this guide we use a deep teal, warm stone and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MIDAC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.