Nutresa Brand Guidelines: Medellín’s 1920 Chocolate Company and Its 2011 Group Name

A Medellín chocolate merger of 1920.

Grupo Nutresa is a food company from Medellín whose story starts with chocolate. El Colombiano, marking the company’s centenary in July 2020, traced it to the Compañía Nacional de Chocolates, founded in 1920, a date the newspaper tied to the early growth of Colombia’s manufacturing industry. The company was set up as the Compañía Nacional de Chocolates Cruz Roja, the name under which it advertised in the newspaper’s own pages in those years.

Its origin was a merger. The company’s president at the time of the centenary told El Colombiano that it grew out of the joining of small producers of table chocolate, the solid blocks that are melted down for a hot drink. The chocolate company is still a named business inside the group a century later, and in October 2026 it was the unit chosen to take in a new Ecuadorian purchase.

The 1930s widened the business. A business historian at Medellín’s EAFIT university, quoted in the same 2020 report, said that in the decade of the Great Depression the company created the Sello Rojo brand and became a shareholder in the Fábrica de Galletas Noel, a biscuit maker founded in Medellín in 1916. Noel is still one of the group’s brands, which makes it one of the oldest names in the portfolio.

The holding company changed its name more than once. By 2011 it traded as Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A., and on 31 March 2011 ABC Economía reported that it would from then on be called Grupo Nutresa. The reason given was breadth: the group ran several food lines besides chocolate, and its president said the new name was tied to nutrition and took in every food category the company worked in. The report said that as many as 64 names had been proposed before a research process, including surveys and expert analysis, settled on Nutresa.

The name is a corporate one, made for a holding. El Colombiano in January 2025 described Grupo Nutresa as a food holding that owns brands such as Noel, Jet, Zenú and Crem Helado: the names on the packs, with Nutresa as the owner behind them.

Food categories, and new purchases.

Nutresa is organised by category. Writing in October 2026, the Ecuadorian news site Primicias described the group as a Medellín food manufacturer present in more than 80 countries, with a portfolio of dozens of brands in cold meats, biscuits, chocolates, coffee, ice cream, pasta and fast food.

The group has kept adding brands under its current owners. In May 2026, Portafolio reported, Nutresa closed its purchase of Mimo’s, an ice-cream business with a plant in Medellín and more than 200 points of sale. In July 2026 it signed a contract to buy the whole of Industrias Tío Rico, an ice-cream maker in Venezuela with a plant in Guacara, Carabobo state, and brands including Tío Rico, Bati Bati and Chocolito. Portafolio said the closing remained subject to the usual conditions agreed between the parties, so the deal was agreed in July 2026; not completed at the time of writing.

The October 2026 purchase brings the story back to chocolate. On 30 October 2026, Primicias reported, Nutresa completed its purchase of La Universal, a confectioner founded in Guayaquil in 1889 by the Italian immigrants Juan Bautista Segale, Emilio Segale and Domingo Norero. Its Manicho, Huevitos and Cocoa Universal lines reached the market in 1911, and the company had belonged to Grupo Nobis from 2005 and to a Madrid-based investment company from 2018. According to Primicias, La Universal is to be folded into the Compañía Nacional de Chocolates, the business that gave the group its start in 1920.

Together, the 2026 deals cover an ice-cream business in Medellín, an ice-cream maker in Venezuela and a nineteenth-century chocolate maker in Ecuador, each keeping its own brand names under the Nutresa holding.

Design and documentation.

The food brands in this group sit on supermarket shelves across Brazil, Colombia and Argentina: milk, cheese, biscuits, coffee, sauces and other pantry staples bought week after week. Their identities are built for that setting. Cartons, tins, jars and packets carry the brand name in large type, named ranges sit under one master brand, and television campaigns often put a well-known face beside the pack, as Piracanjuba did with the singer Ivete Sangalo, according to the O Povo advertising column in 2020.

Many of these names began as small regional firms and took the name of a town, a region or a family. Piracanjuba is named after the Goiás town where it began as a butter maker in 1955, and that town’s name comes from a Tupi-Guarani word for a fish of the cerrado. A single company can also own several brands at once, some built from scratch and some bought in, as Grupo Piracanjuba does with Piracanjuba, LeitBom and Emana, according to Exame and the company.

Ownership takes several forms. Some brands belong to family-owned companies that do not publish accounts; others belong to listed food groups or to multinationals; and brands also move between owners through purchases, licences and court-supervised sales. Valor Econômico reported in 2019 that Nestlé licensed its Ninho and Molico milk brands to the company behind Piracanjuba, and Globo Rural reported in 2015 that Italac’s owner bought the Nilza brand after its former company’s bankruptcy.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it today, where it makes its products and how its range and campaigns are presented. Ownership changes are given with their dates, and anything that rests only on a company’s own corporate pages is attributed to the company.

A change of control in stages.

Ownership is the other half of Nutresa’s recent story. For years Grupo Sura and Grupo Argos, companies of the Medellín business group known as the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño, held shares in Nutresa. In June 2023, Finance Colombia reported that the group and the banker Jaime Gilinski had negotiated a deal under which Gilinski and his partners would take control of Nutresa, while Grupo Sura and Grupo Argos would give up their Nutresa stock and three companies linked to him, JGDB Holding, Nugil and IHC Capital Holding, would give up their shares in Grupo Sura.

The deal closed in stages. Portafolio reported on 4 April 2024 that the Gilinski family and its partners at IHC, an Abu Dhabi investor, had held 76.9 per cent of Nutresa since February 2024. A public tender offer for the remaining shares was then accepted by holders of 22.48 per cent, according to Colombian stock exchange data quoted by the paper, taking the partners to about 99.38 per cent.

In March 2025 the same newspaper said Gilinski had been the group’s president since January. The October 2026 report in Primicias still quoted Gilinski as the company’s president.

For a design guide, Nutresa shows a holding name chosen in 2011 to sit above a century of food brands, from table chocolate to ice cream. Compare Quala, another Colombian food company built on many brand names, and Bimbo, the Mexico City bakery that grew into a multinational. For this guide we use a cocoa brown, a coffee red and a warm cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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