Solaria Brand Guidelines: A 1991 Cikarang Eatery, PT Sinar Solaria and a Purple Shopfront

Four staff, factory workers and a name taken from the sun.

Solaria began as a small eatery outside Jakarta. Its founder, Aliuyanto, graduated from the economics faculty of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta in 1985 and spent five years as an employee of a private company before leaving to start a food business, detikFinance reported in September 2022, citing the university’s website. In 1991 he opened his first restaurant. IDN Times wrote in November 2024 that it began in a shophouse near the Lippo Cikarang industrial estate in Bekasi, east of Jakarta, and at first served workers from the factories nearby; Bloomberg Technoz gave the same place and year in July 2025.

The start was modest. Merdeka reported in May 2023 that the business began with four employees, that five years of saved salary was not enough capital at first, and that cooking was not something the founder counted as a hobby. The restaurant took about four years to become widely known: detikFinance and Bloomberg Technoz both date that turning point to 1995, the year that some profiles give as the brand’s start. IDX Channel reported in January 2023 that Solaria had ten outlets by 1995.

The menu was built on everyday food that anyone could order. IDN Times described early dishes as daily meals for all kinds of customers, and Bloomberg Technoz wrote that the founder chose generous portions as the way to stand out from the start, and the same report still listed large portions among the chain’s hallmarks in 2025.

The name and the mark have stated meanings. Quoting Solaria’s official Twitter account, detikFinance wrote that the name comes from the Latin word for sun, with the sense of a shining sun at the centre of a solar system. Quoting the Solaria Indonesia Facebook page, it said the round logo stands for something unbroken and continuous, with no sharp edges, and symbolises the earth. Those are the company’s own explanations of its mark.

Fried rice, kwetiau and cordon bleu, in malls and rest areas.

Press coverage places Solaria in the family-restaurant category. Bloomberg Technoz described it in July 2025 as a family dining concept with a varied menu that runs from local dishes such as nasi goreng teri Medan, fried rice with Medan anchovies, to Asian plates such as kwetiau ayam and Western dishes such as chicken cordon bleu. detikFinance listed kwetiau siram ayam and nasi ayam mentega, a butter chicken rice, among its familiar dishes, and also named its fuyunghai. The company’s own website groups part of its noodle range under a “Lo Mie & I Fu Mie” heading.

Where the restaurants sit is part of how the brand is seen. Outlets are found mostly in shopping malls, airports and other public places, detikFinance wrote in 2022; Bloomberg Technoz added transport terminals and the rest areas on Indonesia’s toll roads, and wrote that the chain served everyone from students and office workers to families.

The network grew in steps, according to dated reports. IDX Channel reported in January 2023 that Solaria had reached about 130 outlets in 25 cities roughly a decade after the late 1990s. In September 2022 detikFinance put the count at 200 outlets in 31 provinces and 55 major cities, with thousands of employees. In July 2025 Bloomberg Technoz wrote of more than 200 branches in 55 large cities.

Solaria does not franchise. IDX Channel reported in January 2023 that every outlet is run directly by PT Sinar Solaria, the company that IDN Times and Bloomberg Technoz also name as the operator. Bloomberg Technoz described it as the company set up to manage the chain’s expansion and development professionally, with Aliuyanto directing changes in concept, staff management and the use of technology in daily operations. IDN Times reported that Solaria received halal certification from the Indonesian Ulema Council, MUI, in 2013, and the company’s website links to a halal certificate page alongside its outlet finder.

How the category presents itself.

Indonesian restaurant, bakery, noodle, donut and café chains meet most of their customers in a small number of settings: the shopping mall, the airport, the railway station, the shophouse row and, increasingly, the rest areas along the toll roads. In each of these the shopfront has to work from a distance. A single dominant colour, a short name and a sign that can be read across a food court often do more of the identity work than any printed material.

Inside, the menu board is where a brand is defined. Chains in this category tend to name their dishes and drinks plainly, whether a fried rice, a noodle bowl, a bento set, a filled bun or an iced tea, and to group them into sets and children’s packages. Packaging follows the same logic: takeaway boxes, cups and bags carry the name and colours out of the room, and delivery-only kitchens and kiosk formats now let a brand trade with little more than a counter and its packaging.

The store network is itself part of the story the companies tell. Corporate pages often present history as a sequence of openings, a first outlet in a new city or on a new island, a numbered milestone store, and a running count of outlets and cities across the archipelago and, for some chains, abroad. Those counts change quickly, so each one needs its date attached.

Ownership is described in different ways. Some chains are run by a single private company that keeps every outlet in its own hands; others grow through franchise or partnership networks, and some sit inside larger food and drink groups. Founders’ stories, the operating company’s name and the halal certification a chain holds are commonly set out on the corporate pages, and the guides that follow give each of them only as the sources state them.

A purple room you can spot across a mall.

Colour is the most clearly documented part of Solaria’s identity. In July 2025 Bloomberg Technoz wrote that a striking purple is the visual identity people connect with the brand, and that almost all outlets use purple-toned interiors and exteriors, which make them easy to pick out in a crowded mall or a toll-road rest area. The same report described the restaurants as minimalist and modern in look, clean and comfortable for diners of all ages, a long way from the simple eatery the business started as.

That shift from a single shophouse to a standard format is the thread of most coverage. Bloomberg Technoz wrote that the founder stressed consistency in taste, service and the look of the restaurants, and that he spoke to Universitas Gadjah Mada graduates in 2016 about taking risks and spotting openings with limited means. detikFinance quoted the principle he applies to running the company: that every obstacle should be solved with knowledge and skill.

The round mark, in the company’s own explanation, is meant to read as continuous and without sharp edges, and the name points to the sun. Together with a single dominant colour carried from the shopfront into the dining room, those are the elements a visitor meets first, before the menu board and its long list of rice and noodle dishes.

For a design guide, Solaria shows how one colour carried through shopfronts and dining rooms can make a company-run chain recognisable across hundreds of sites. Compare HokBen, a Jakarta chain that also keeps every outlet in company hands, and Bakmi GM, a Jakarta noodle restaurant. For this guide we use deep violet, soft lilac and warm cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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