Jofemar Brand Guidelines: Félix Guinduláin’s 1971 Peralta Workshop Turned Vending Maker

Electrolytic baths in a 200-square-metre workshop.

Jofemar began in 1971 in Peralta, a town in the south of Navarra, in northern Spain. The company’s own history says Félix Guinduláin Vidondo set up what is now Jofemar Corporación in a workshop of about 200 square metres in the town centre, and that at first it did not make machines at all: it specialised in surface treatments of parts using electrolytic baths. The founding year and founder are confirmed by Vending Times, which in December 2015 reported a company review of “Jofemar’s history since its foundation in 1971 by Félix Guindulain Vidondo.”

Over the following decades the business moved into vending. The company says its Jofemar division, “the basis for this growth,” develops, produces and sells automated dispensing and vending machines, payment systems, telemetry and management software for the vending trade. It describes the group today as a “family multinational expert in advanced electronics and mechatronics,” with facilities of about 52,000 square metres in Peralta, capacity for roughly 2,000 machines a month on a single shift, and customers in 84 countries; those figures are its own.

The family is still in charge. Vending Times named Félix Guindulain Busto as the company’s vice-president in 2015, and the Navarra investment-promotion site Invest in Navarra reported in February 2023 that the group’s president, Félix Guindulain, had thanked the regional investment body Sodena for its support, during a meeting that included a short exchange with the founders.

Made in Peralta, sold abroad.

Jofemar keeps its manufacturing at home. Vending Times reported in 2015 that the company designs and manufactures its technology exclusively at its headquarters in Peralta and sells it worldwide,. It sells through national offices in Spain and commercial subsidiaries abroad: in 2015 Vending Times reported the opening of a subsidiary in São Paulo, which it said gave Jofemar four international subsidiaries and five national offices. The company’s website now lists subsidiaries in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom and France, and Spanish work centres in Peralta, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Seville.

Its machines are sold under range names rather than numbers alone. The company’s catalogue divides its vending machines into ambient and refrigerated models — including the Qendra, the Qendra Touch and the Vision family, such as the Vision EsPlus and Vision EasyCombo — and frozen-food machines under the Nuuk name. The company says the channels in its snack machines are adjusted to each type of packaging so that the whole tray surface can be used. Alongside these it lists coffee vending machines, payment and cash-management systems, control units, and telemetry and cloud management.

Payment hardware is a business of its own inside the group. The company’s catalogue lists coin machines, banknote readers, card readers and coin selectors, along with hoppers and classifiers, for use in its own machines and elsewhere. On quality, the company says that in 1996 it became the first company in the vending sector to obtain ISO 9001 certification, awarded by TÜV Rheinland, and that its processes now run under an integrated management system meeting ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, audited every year.

The 2015 opening in Brazil was also the moment the company changed its look. Vending Times reported that Jofemar presented a new corporate image there, “symbolized by a redesigned logotype,” along with three new divisions: Jofemar Health, Jofemar Energy and Jofemar Global Services. The same report described Velántur Cars, a joint venture with the Spanish company Retrofactory to build electric luxury cars.

The category.

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.

Vending first, then energy and electric mobility.

Vending remains the core, but the group has spread beyond it. Invest in Navarra reported in February 2023 that Jofemar Corporation worked in vending, electric mobility and energy storage, that it was following a 2021–2025 strategic plan, and that it had been building new business lines — Jofemar Energy, electromobility and health — from its position in vending, together with a Global Services division that gives technical support to customers of every part of the group. The same report said the company employed 303 people, estimated its indirect jobs in the region at around 600, and noted that Sodena, the venture-capital instrument of the Government of Navarra, had held a stake in the group since 2017.

The company’s English-language pages call the group Jofemar Corporation and its Spanish pages Jofemar Corporación; the vending business is the Jofemar division within it. Its website says the group invests in research, development and innovation, and that the ability to adapt and “customise” its solutions has always been a mainstay of its strategy. The current home page leads with an image of the Qendra Touch vending machine.

For a design guide, Jofemar shows how a family workshop can grow into a branded electronics group while keeping production in one small town. Compare Azkoyen, another Spanish vending maker, and Coca-Cola, a drinks brand often seen on vending machines. For this guide we use a deep blue, ink and a frost white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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