Alkosto Brand Guidelines: Grupo Corbeta’s Colombian Hypermarket Chain, Born in Bogotá

A cloth distributor that became a retailer.

Alkosto is a Colombian chain of large stores that sells household appliances, groceries, tyres, technology, motorcycles and home goods. Spanish Wikipedia describes it as the property of Grupo Corbeta, says it trades in twenty cities and municipalities, and gives a workforce of between 2,300 and 2,500 people as of 2023. Its first store, the same entry says, was in Bogotá. On its own website the company dates the start of its business in Colombia to 1986, describing the store as a new answer to the needs of “grandes consumidores,” large-volume shoppers. The legal names in the site’s footer are Alkosto S.A. and Colombiana de Comercio S.A.

Colombiana de Comercio is the formal name of the group better known as Corbeta, El Colombiano explained in a November 2022 profile in its “Forjadores” series on the companies of Antioquia. The newspaper described it as a conglomerate that owns the Alkosto, Alkomprar and Ktronix stores and distributes more than 70 brands across household appliances, technology, automotive products, home goods and agricultural supplies. Its founder was Santiago Mejía Olarte, who, according to the profile, had worked for the textile maker Fabricato and helped extend its business in the southern cities of Pasto and Ipiales, near the border with Ecuador.

Mejía Olarte founded Corbeta in 1938 as a distributor of cloth, El Colombiano reported, a trade that drew on his years at Fabricato. In 1958 the company began distributing consumer goods, and today it also works as a wholesale distributor. In 2022 the newspaper counted more than 1,000 sales representatives serving close to 30,000 self-service stores, neighbourhood shops, minimarkets and other customers, and it named the founder’s son, the economist Manuel Santiago Mejía, as the man at the head of the group.

One owner, three store formats.

Alkosto is the generalist of the group. Pulzo, the Colombian news site, set out the difference in December 2024: Alkosto is a large-format store with appliances, technology, furniture, clothing and more for a broad public, while Ktronix specialises in computers, phones, televisions, video games and accessories. Pulzo wrote that Ktronix began as an Alkosto initiative to meet demand for technology and became a separate brand inside the group, and that the shared ownership shows in “similarities in their images,” although each chain keeps its own line of business.

The third chain, Alkomprar, is a technology retailer that dates from 2003, Portafolio reported in July 2025 as it marked 22 years of trading. The business newspaper said Alkomprar then had 24 physical stores and delivered to more than 930 municipalities. Alkosto’s own site gives the same reach of more than 930 municipalities for its deliveries. Pulzo also names Kalley among the group’s holdings.

The group has also put money into payments. In February 2019 Portafolio reported that the investment arm of Corbeta, which it described as the owner of Alkosto, had led a funding round for Tpaga, a mobile wallet from the founders of the ride app Tappsi. The aim was to let neighbourhood shops order and pay for goods through the app; Corbeta then served more than 50,000 such shops across Colombia, the newspaper said.

Online selling came earlier. Alkosto’s timeline says it opened its web store, alkosto.com, in 2010 with more than 1,000 items, and that the range now runs to more than 1,600 technology and home references. It frames its promise as “hiperahorro,” a coined word that joins the Spanish for “hyper” and “saving.”

Design and documentation.

Colombia, Peru and Argentina have large retail chains that grew from a single shop into national networks, and most of them present themselves first through their formats. A company’s own pages usually set out its hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount stores, department stores, home-improvement centres and pharmacies as separate banners, each with its own name and fascia. In Colombia, Olímpica’s formats were listed in 2024 by El Heraldo as supertiendas, superalmacenes, superdroguerías and droguerías, while Grupo Éxito runs the Éxito and Carulla banners and the Viva shopping centres, according to Spanish Wikipedia.

Own-label ranges carry much of the identity inside the shop. Grupo Éxito sells its own clothing labels, People, Arkitect and Bronzini, El Colombiano reported in March 2024, and Olímpica has private labels across supermarket, textile, appliance, technology and home categories, according to El Heraldo. Seasonal campaigns, printed leaflets and anniversary promotions are published on the chains’ websites next to store finders and online shops.

Ownership is part of the story, and it often crosses borders. Grupo Éxito passed from the French group Casino to the Salvadoran Grupo Calleja through tender offers that closed in January 2024, according to the company’s own filing, and in March 2026 its Argentine subsidiary agreed to hand twelve stores to the Patagonian chain La Anónima. Several Peruvian chains belong to wider groups, and each guide here names the owner with the date a source gives.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders and founding dates, stock-exchange listings and investor filings, and the family holding companies behind many of the chains. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand from dated press, registers and the companies’ own filings, and keeps company descriptions marked as the company’s own word.

Large stores outside the capital.

The chain’s latest documented opening is in Mosquera, in Cundinamarca, west of Bogotá. The news site Colombia.com reported on 24 July 2025 that the store opened that day at the road junction linking Mosquera with Madrid, in a building of more than 14,000 square metres with a 7,008-square-metre shop on two floors and parking for more than 300 cars, 209 motorcycles and 80 bicycles. It put the chain at 20 stores in Colombia. Pulzo, writing before the opening, listed Alkosto cities that include Bogotá, Cali, Pereira, Villavicencio, Pasto, Sincelejo and Yopal; the company’s own store finder lists twelve cities, and Spanish Wikipedia gives an older, undated figure of 17 stores, so counts depend on the date of the source.

Ownership has stayed with the founding family. Pulzo wrote in 2025 that Grupo Corbeta belongs to the Mejía Correa family, with Manuel Santiago Mejía Correa as president of the holding company, and it described the group’s roots as a textile distributor founded in 1938. Its account puts the move into consumer goods in the 1960s; El Colombiano gives 1958, the date used here.

Alkosto’s identity work is not documented in the sources used for this guide: there is no published account of who drew its logo or chose its colours. What the press does record is the family resemblance between Alkosto and Ktronix that Pulzo noted.

For a design guide, Alkosto shows how a family-owned distributor can run several store brands that look related but sell to different needs. Compare Éxito, the Antioquia-born grocery chain, and Olímpica, another Colombian retailer built by one family. For this guide we use a deep blue, a warm orange and paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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