Serunion Brand Guidelines: A Barcelona Caterer Since 1990, Elior Group & Singularis

A Barcelona company that dates itself to 1990.

Serunion is a contract caterer: a company that runs kitchens and dining rooms for schools, hospitals, care homes, universities and businesses that do not cook for themselves. Its own history page opens with the line “since 1990 at the service of people,” and says that over more than three decades it has widened its activity and added new services. The company’s head office is in Barcelona: El Mundo described it as a company with its base in the city in June 2016, and La Vanguardia reported in February 2024 that more than 500 people worked on central services at the Barcelona headquarters.

Ownership is the other half of the story. La Vanguardia wrote in 2024 that Serunion had belonged to the French Elior group since 2001. English Wikipedia’s article on Elior Group says that between 2001 and 2006 the French company’s growth abroad was marked by alliances with Serunion and with Areas in Spain, and that Elior today organises its catering by country, with Serunion as the name it uses in Spain alongside Elior France, Elior UK, Elior Italia and Elior North America. Serunion’s website now sits on an Elior address and describes the group as its international backing.

Elior itself changed in 2022 and 2023. English Wikipedia says the French services group Derichebourg raised its stake in Elior to just over 48 percent in December 2022, in exchange for its multiservices business, and that Elior shareholders approved the deal at a general meeting on 18 April 2023. In November 2024 La Vanguardia described Serunion as part of the combined group that followed the merger of Elior Group and Derichebourg Multiservices, and in March 2026 the Spanish trade publication Alimarket still described it as belonging to the French Elior group.

The management has been stable over a long period. El Mundo quoted the company’s chair, Antoni Llorens, at a Barcelona press conference in 2016, and La Vanguardia quoted him in 2024 as chief executive and chair, adding that the management team had led the business for more than thirty years.

Schools, hospitals, workplaces and Singularis.

Serunion’s core work is catering for groups of people, which Spanish calls restauración colectiva. The company’s service pages list four settings: education, care homes and social centres, hospitals and health centres, and companies and institutions. Alimarket reported in March 2026 that the business is organised in matching divisions, named Serunion Educa for schools, Serunion B&I for businesses and institutions, Serunion Salud for health centres and a social division for residential care.

Scale has grown steadily, according to the press. El Mundo reported in 2016 that the company ran 2,920 catering sites in Spain and Portugal with 18,200 staff, a network of 25 offices, five vending branches and 16 central kitchens, and that it had just opened two new central kitchens, in San Fernando de Henares near Madrid and in Valladolid. La Vanguardia put the workforce at more than 20,600 in February 2024, of which about 9,000 were lunchtime monitors in school dining rooms. Alimarket gave about 28,000 employees and close to 500,000 meals a day at 3,101 sites across Spain in March 2026. The same 2024 La Vanguardia report says the activity in Portugal passed to a Derichebourg subsidiary there.

The second name in the house is Singularis, the company’s catering brand for events and cultural venues. El Mundo listed FC Barcelona, the Palau de la Música Catalana, L’Auditori and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya among the places it served in 2016, and Alimarket added CaixaForum, the Gran Teatre del Liceu and Barcelona’s maritime museum in 2026. According to Alimarket, Serunion added the Madrid events caterer Cobos Catering to Singularis at the start of 2026.

Services beyond the kitchen are newer. La Vanguardia reported in February 2024 that, for the first time in more than thirty years, Serunion would offer cleaning, maintenance, concierge and gardening work, and that it had taken over the cleaning business of Grupo Net, based in Elche. In November 2024 the paper reported that Serunion had announced the purchase of Grupo Alarcón, a Madrid cleaning and outsourcing company with 2,500 staff, and Alimarket wrote in 2026 that the group had joined in October 2024. The current website lists facility management, purchasing management, home-help services and vending next to catering.

How contract caterers present themselves.

Contract caterers sell a service that happens inside someone else’s building, so their brands have to work in two places at once: on the corporate pages where owners and clients read about them, and on the counters, menus and uniforms that guests see. Most of their public material shows food and venues rather than the company itself. Delaware North’s history page, for example, tells its story as a slide show of dated photographs, and Levy’s press room is a run of venue announcements.

Large groups split that work into sectors. Compass Group says it organises its business by market, a model it calls “sectorisation,” delivered through a portfolio of brands; its sectors include business and industry, healthcare and senior living, education, and sports and leisure. In that model a workplace canteen, a school kitchen and a stadium concourse can each carry a different name, even when one parent owns them all.

Some companies go the other way. In November 2014 Delaware North announced one global identity, dropped “Companies” and the DNC initials from its logo, and folded most of its operating units into a single name, keeping Sportservice as a named exception. Levy, owned by Compass since 2006, has instead added named units of its own, from E15 to Rank + Rally, each with its own launch year.

For a reader trying to understand these brands, the most useful sources are the companies’ own history and ownership pages, read alongside dated reporting. This guide gives founding dates, owners and contracts only as those sources state them, attributes each claim, and treats the visual identity described here as an unofficial interpretation rather than a reproduction of any company’s mark.

Local suppliers, four languages and a group mission.

Serunion’s website sets out a short statement of purpose: to look after people at every stage of their lives. The values it lists are closeness, commitment, innovation and excellence, and the homepage repeats the first idea in a line saying the company is present every day in the lives of thousands of people. The site can be read in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque, and an office map lists regional bases and central kitchens from Andalusia and Galicia to Murcia and the Basque Country.

The local angle also runs through its press coverage. In 2016 El Mundo reported that the chair wanted the company to become “more local, more regional and more ecological,” and that it was again looking at buying smaller firms in regions where it had no presence. Under the wider Elior group, the site carries the group’s sustainability programme Aimer sa Terre, and Alimarket reported in 2026 on an in-house programme called Serunion Innova, which gathers ideas from staff.

For a design guide, Serunion shows how a national caterer can keep a single short name across schools, hospitals, offices and events while a second name, Singularis, carries the venue work, all under a French owner’s group identity. Compare Elior, its parent group, and Sodexo, another French-based caterer. For this guide we use an olive kitchen green, wheat and a terracotta accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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