Rheavendors Brand Guidelines: The Caronno Pertusella Coffee Machine Maker Founded in 1960

An idea brought home from the United States.

Rheavendors — the company often shortens its own name to Rhea — makes coffee and vending machines in Caronno Pertusella, a town in the province of Varese. The local newspaper SaronnoNews, reporting in March 2026, wrote that it was founded in 1960 by Aldo Majer after an idea that came to him in the United States, and that it is now among the world’s main makers of automatic drinks dispensers, present in more than 100 countries.

The company tells its own story through family. Its website says Rhea “has always been a family business” and that Aldo Majer, and later his son Carlo, laid the foundations of what Rhea Vendors has become. Today it describes itself as an “extended family business”, in which colleagues in branch offices abroad, technicians on the factory floor and the board of directors are all part of one community. More than sixty years after its founding, the company says, it still feels like a family.

Its early machines were not all for coffee. SaronnoNews noted that a tour of the headquarters starts with an iconic chewing-gum dispenser from the 1960s and ends with recent machines fitted with interactive screens. The plant on Via Trieste was renovated in 2020 and 2021 with attention to sustainability, the paper said, and it houses a showroom that traces how the machines’ design changed through work with well-known designers.

In March 2026 the headquarters opened to the public for the Giornate FAI di Primavera, the spring heritage weekend run by Italy’s national trust, FAI. The newspaper presented the visit as a journey through industrial history and the coffee break, with guided tours of about forty minutes.

Tabletop machines, freestanding vendors and special projects.

Rhea Vendors Group S.p.A. describes itself as an international group of companies based in Varese that makes and distributes coffee and vending machines. Its range is split between tabletop hot-drinks machines, freestanding machines for hot and cold drinks, and furniture to go around them. The rhTT10, a recent tabletop model, has a 10-inch touch screen, up to 48 direct selections and fresh-milk service; the company says it brings “the coffeehouse experience to the tabletop.”

Customisation is a large part of the pitch. On its “Tailor Made” page Rhea says it supplies custom machines, “proudly Made in Italy”, designed to fit different corporate styles and different local drinking habits, so that a machine can carry a client’s brand identity. That is the company’s own claim about where and how its machines are made.

Its special projects show how far it takes the idea. Monolite, created with the photographer Simona Ghizzoni and the director Davide Livermore, sets a machine behind backlit glass printed with photographs taken at the Tevere-Farfa nature reserve; using augmented reality, a user can animate a peacock in the picture while the drink is made. The Coffee Landscape, developed with Carlo Ratti Associati and the architect Italo Rota, is an office coffee station with three dispensing points surrounded by triangular modular seats, so that colleagues face each other while they wait. Carlo Ratti described the aim as increasing the “coffee-machine effect”, bringing people together around the machine.

Barista On Demand goes further still: the company calls it the first autonomous coffee bar to talk to users through an AI-generated avatar of the coffee expert Andrea Lattuada, ordered through an app and delivered by a self-driving station. Rhea says it was shown at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai in 2023 and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2024.

Design and documentation.

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 family firm that calls itself an extended family.

Design awards have followed the special projects. In January 2026 Rhea announced that Barista On Demand had won a GOOD DESIGN Award 2025 in the Retail Fittings category, presented by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. The company says the jury chose it from more than 1,100 projects from over 55 countries, and that it followed an earlier GOOD DESIGN Award for Monolite in 2022. SaronnoNews also reported in 2026 that some Rhea products have been exhibited at MoMA in New York.

The group sells abroad through its own companies. Its website lists branch offices in nine countries, among them Rheavendors Apliven in Spain, Rhea Vendors Benelux in the Netherlands, Rhea Vendors France, Rheavendors Österreich, Rheavendors Polska and Rheavendors Servomat Deutschland. Head office and administration stay at Caronno Pertusella.

Rhea also presents itself through its environmental record. Its website names an ISO 14001 certificate and a 2025 sustainability report, and says it uses electricity from renewable sources, FSC-certified packaging and, on selected models, a technology called Varitherm, which heats water by induction only when it is needed. These are the company’s own statements.

For a design guide, Rheavendors shows how a vending machine maker can sell the coffee break itself — through custom finishes, art projects and furniture — rather than only the machine. Compare Evoca Group, another northern Italian coffee and vending machine maker, and Lavazza, the Turin coffee roaster. For this guide we use roast brown, crema and brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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