A prince, two Irish brothers and 350 cows.

Almarai, whose name is Arabic for “the pastures,” is a Saudi dairy company with its head office in Riyadh. English Wikipedia gives its founding date as 1 July 1977 and names three founders: the Saudi prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer and two Irish brothers, Alastair McGuckian and Paddy McGuckian, whom Arabic Wikipedia describes as agricultural pioneers. Arabic Wikipedia says the company began production in 1977 with a herd of 350 cows.

Its early shape was scattered. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s own history, says that in the early 1990s Almarai went through a period of restructuring and reinvestment. Five decentralised processing plants were replaced by a single central processing plant, and ten small dairy farms spread across Saudi Arabia were replaced by four large dairy farms at Al Kharj, in the kingdom’s central region. English Wikipedia describes Al Kharj, about 60 miles from Riyadh, as the company’s primary facility, with dairy and juice processing, a bakery and an infant-nutrition factory on the site.

The private company became a public one in 2005. That year, English Wikipedia says, citing HSBC’s offering documents, Almarai converted from a limited-liability company into a joint-stock company as part of an initial public offering in which 30% of its shares were floated on the Saudi stock exchange, Tadawul. Arabic Wikipedia dates its registration on Tadawul to 17 August 2005. The shares trade under the code 2280.

Cheese, bread, chicken and juice.

After the listing Almarai widened its range step by step. In 2006 it ran a cheddar cheese promotion across the Middle East, aiming to raise the number of households buying the cheese regularly, Arab News reported in July 2006. At the start of 2007, English Wikipedia says, it signed a memorandum of understanding to acquire up to 100% of Western Bakeries; the bakery names L’usine and 7Days appear among the company’s brands in English Wikipedia’s list.

2009 brought two larger moves. Almarai and PepsiCo formed a joint venture, International Dairy and Juice Limited, known as IDJ, which bought the Egyptian dairy and juice company Beyti, PepsiCo announced in December 2009; English Wikipedia says IDJ also took a 75% stake in the Jordanian dairy producer Teeba that year. The same year Almarai entered poultry by buying the Hail Agricultural Development Company, Reuters reported in November 2009; English Wikipedia lists Alyoum among the company’s brands. In December 2011 Reuters reported that Almarai was buying Fondomonte, an Argentine farming company, to secure feed for its livestock, and in 2016, according to a National Post report of March that year, it bought about 14,000 acres of farmland in California.

Investment at home kept pace. In 2011 Almarai announced it would invest heavily in Saudi Arabia to raise dairy production, and Arab News reported that it would create 12,000 jobs in the kingdom over five years, English Wikipedia says. It also says that in 2018 a poll by the British market research company YouGov found Almarai to be the most popular brand in Saudi Arabia for the third year in a row. Acquisitions continued into the 2020s: in March 2021 Almarai agreed to buy the UAE and Bahrain operations of the bakery company Bakemart, and in 2023 it took full ownership of IDJ, English Wikipedia says. Other names on that brand list include the juice label Almarai Refresh and the infant-nutrition lines Nuralac and Evolac.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and they come from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, the United States and Turkey: Almarai, Americana, Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Cortas, Ziyad, Tamek and Eti. Middle Eastern and Turkish food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood grocer to a supermarket shelf abroad.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founding family, a food group and a sovereign fund.

Almarai’s shareholder register mixes family, corporate and state money. English Wikipedia gives the 2023 shareholding as 34.52% held by the Saudi food group Savola, 23.69% by Prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer and 16.32% by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, through SALIC. The fund’s stake was announced in late 2017, and Bloomberg reported that the shares rose about 4% on the news, English Wikipedia says; the same year Savola said it would reduce its holding by 2%.

By 2014, English Wikipedia says, Almarai controlled 44% of the dairy market in the Gulf region, and between 2006 and 2016 its workforce grew to about 38,000. In 2018 it announced plans to invest in production facilities in the Middle East, and English Wikipedia says that between 2019 and 2023 the focus was on farms, distribution and transport, to make it easier to expand across the region. Forbes Middle East ranked it 43rd on its list of the Top 100 Listed Companies for 2025. English Wikipedia also says Almarai was the first dairy farm in Saudi Arabia to be accredited to the ISO 22000 food-safety standard.

Its visual history is less documented than its corporate one. English Wikipedia’s infobox dates the current Almarai logo to 2010, while the company’s brand list now runs from milk and cheese to bread, poultry, juice and infant nutrition.

For a design guide, Almarai shows how a single name can carry a company from a 350-cow dairy to bakeries, poultry and juice. Compare Vinamilk, Vietnam’s dairy founded in 1976, and Amul, the Anand dairy co-operative of 1946. For this guide we use a pasture green, a sky blue and a milk white with a clean geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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