Azkoyen Brand Guidelines: The Peralta Coin-Selector Maker Behind Cashlogy & Coffetek

From farm machinery to coin selectors in Navarre.

Azkoyen began in 1945 in Peralta, a town in Navarre, northern Spain. The company’s own history names its founder as Martín Luis Troyas Osés and its first business as Talleres Azkoyen, the Azkoyen workshops, which made agricultural machinery; it says he also registered patents for a washing machine, a wicker-peeling machine and a motorised cradle. Spanish Wikipedia gives the same founding year and the same town.

The turn to vending came within a decade. In 1956, the company says, it began making the SUR-ME, a small wall machine that sold lighter fuel for 10-céntimo coins, and from 1959 it made coin selectors that told 1- and 5-peseta pieces apart; the first were fitted to sweet-vending machines. Spanish Wikipedia adds that from 1959 Azkoyen sold coin validators to other machine makers, the start of the payment business that still sits beside vending in the group.

The 1960s and 1970s filled out the range. The company’s timeline lists the Polimatic of 1961, which it calls the first cigarette vending machine in Spain, and the Novamatic of 1965, known for its pull handles. The Cafemat, its first hot-drinks machine, followed in 1977, and the Husimat, its first electronic snack machine, in 1978; the Botelmat, for cold drinks, came in 1981.

Over the same years Azkoyen grew from a family firm into a group. Its timeline dates the birth of Grupo Azkoyen and its listing on the Madrid stock exchange to 18 July 1988, with expansion abroad from then on; Spanish Wikipedia, citing an earlier version of the company’s history, dates the formation of the group to 1970 and the listing to 1980, so the two accounts differ.

Customisable fronts, glass and touch keys.

The company links its look to its electronics. Its timeline says the electronic coin selector it patented in 1985 marked the start of a change in the image and design of its machines, with the new series later applied to gaming machines and public telephones. In 1989 came the Fan range of cold-drinks machines, which the company describes as having a front that could be adapted to any corporate image, with modular can-and-bottle mechanisms; it says the Fan was one of the stars of its stand at the 1992 Expo in Seville. In 1999, the timeline says, all its products were adapted for the euro, and it introduced the Palma series, its widest vending range, and the Hopper U coin dispenser.

Glass arrived on the coffee side in 2012. Azkoyen says its Novara models, and the Zen, Zensia and Vitro families, brought a new design built on glass and neutral cabinet tones; later Vitro versions swapped mechanical buttons for capacitive touch keys behind smoked glass. In 2017, the company says, its Button Gourmet, an automated self-service food system, won a Red Dot design award, and in 2022 a new coffee machine won a European Product Design Award, according to the same timeline. Earlier, in 2013, it says, vending-industry awards in the United Kingdom and Russia went to its coffee machines for their espresso, and in 2014 it created the Homepaq parcel terminal, now called Homecity.

Payment is the group’s other face. Azkoyen launched Cashlogy, an automatic cash-handling unit that takes the place of the till in shops and bars, in 2011, according to its timeline, and its payment brands include Coges, the Italian maker of vending payment systems that joined the group in 2005. The Coges Engine telemetry system lets operators follow sales and payment types, and the Pay4Vend app, created in 2015, lets customers pay at vending machines with a phone, the company says.

Its brand list now runs from Azkoyen and Coffetek in vending to Ascaso in espresso machines and Primion in access control, each with its own name rather than a single group mark.

How vending machine makers present themselves.

Vending machine makers sell to operators, not to the people who buy a coffee or a chocolate bar, so they present themselves in two registers at once. To operators they talk about capacity, reliability, telemetry and ease of refilling; to the public their machines must look inviting on a station concourse, in a university corridor or beside an office kitchen. The glass-front snack machine, with its spiral shelves in view, and the coffee machine with a large lit selection panel are the two faces most people know.

The front panel has become the main design surface. Makers fit touchscreens, illuminated buttons and printed or backlit graphics, and many machines are co-branded with a coffee roaster or a drinks company, so the maker’s own name often sits small on the cabinet. Cashless readers for cards and phones now sit beside, or in place of, the coin slot, and some makers build their own payment and remote-management systems alongside the machines.

Behind the cabinet is an industrial story. Makers’ own websites and brochures tend to show factory lines, sheet-metal cabinets and spare-parts services. Several of the makers in this guide are based in northern Italy and two in Peralta, in Navarre, and some have passed through mergers and private-equity ownership.

The trade meets at fairs such as EU’Vend in Cologne and Venditalia in Milan, where makers launch new ranges to operators and distributors. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed group still based in Peralta.

Today the group is Azkoyen S.A., still based in Peralta and listed in Madrid. Diario de Navarra reported in June 2023 that it had 939 employees in 2022, that it described itself as an international company with ten businesses and production sites in seven countries, and that it was organised in three divisions: vending systems, payment technologies, and time and security. Its website now calls the first of these Coffee & Vending Systems.

Much of that reach came through acquisitions. The company’s timeline records Coffetek of Portishead, England, a designer and maker of hot-drinks vending machines, joining in March 2008, and Primion Technology of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, a maker of access-control and time-recording systems, joining that September. In 2010 it sold its Mocay coffee division to Grupo Leche Pascual; in 2014 it opened the Azkoyen Andina plant in Colombia to supply the Americas; and in 2022 it bought all of Vendon, an internet-of-things specialist, and the espresso-machine maker Ascaso. In 2026 it added Primion AG of Tuggen, Switzerland, the company says.

For a design guide, Azkoyen shows a vending maker whose coin selectors and payment systems grew up alongside its machines, from customisable cold-drinks cabinets to glass-fronted coffee machines. Compare Jofemar, another vending maker based in Peralta, and Evoca, the Italian group behind Necta. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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