Apotek Hjärtat Brand Guidelines: A 2009 Altor Start-Up, Cura & the ICA Symbol

A private-equity start-up and 208 pharmacies.

Apotek Hjärtat — hjärtat is Swedish for “the heart” — was created when Sweden opened its pharmacy market to private owners. Swedish Wikipedia says the company was founded in 2009 under the name ApoPharm Holding AB by the private-equity firm Altor, and that in November of that year it bought 208 pharmacies from the state-owned Apoteket AB as part of the re-regulation of the Swedish pharmacy market. ICA Gruppen’s announcement of 12 November 2014 gives the same account in brief: Apotek Hjärtat “was founded in connection with the deregulation in 2009, when 208 community pharmacies” were acquired.

Swedish Wikipedia says the chain opened under the name Apotek Hjärtat on 8 February 2010, and ICA Gruppen’s company profile likewise says Apotek Hjärtat opened its first pharmacy in 2010.

Growth through purchases came quickly. In May 2010 Apotek Hjärtat bought the 32 Swedish pharmacies of the Norwegian chain Apotek 1, and in April 2013 it bought Vårdapoteket, with 27 established pharmacies, Swedish Wikipedia says. By November 2014 the chain had about 2,700 employees and ran 306 pharmacies, according to ICA Gruppen’s announcement of that month, which described its business as physical pharmacies, e-commerce, inpatient operations and animal pharmacy operations.

From Altor to ICA Gruppen.

In 2014 Altor sold the chain to ICA Gruppen, the Swedish grocery group. On 12 November 2014 ICA Gruppen said it had signed an agreement with Altor Fund III to acquire Apotek Hjärtat. ICA already ran its own pharmacy chain, Cura apoteket, which it said it had set up in 2010. Completion depended on approval from the Swedish Competition Authority, Konkurrensverket, and the Medical Products Agency, Läkemedelsverket.

Approval came on 9 January 2015. ICA Gruppen said Konkurrensverket had cleared the acquisition without restrictions, and Realtid reported the same day that the authority had approved Altor’s sale, adding that the decision allowed ICA to begin integrating Cura and Apotek Hjärtat, with the new company reported as a separate segment from the first quarter of 2015. ICA Gruppen later said the acquisition was completed in January 2015, and its company profile says Apotek Hjärtat has been owned by ICA Gruppen since 2015.

Leadership carried across the sale. ICA Gruppen named Anders Nyberg, chief executive of Apotek Hjärtat at the time of the deal, as the intended head of the combined company in November 2014, and confirmed him again when approval came in January 2015. Swedish Wikipedia lists him as chief executive until 2021, followed by Eric Lundberg from 2021 to 2022 and by Monika Magnusson, who has led the company since 1 September 2022.

The two chains were then folded together. During the spring of 2015 Cura and Apotek Hjärtat were merged into a single company, ICA Gruppen said in May of that year, and Swedish Wikipedia records that the combined business continued under the Apotek Hjärtat name.

How pharmacy chains present themselves.

The guides in this group cover drugstore and pharmacy chains in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Their public face is mostly built from the same parts: a name over the door, a logo on store signs and shopping bags, and own-label beauty and household ranges named as the companies name them. The Austrian chain Bipa, for example, lists own labels such as BI CARE, BI HOME and LOOK BY BIPA on its company page.

Store formats differ more than the signs suggest. Some chains run compact neighbourhood shops; others mix several trades under one roof. German Wikipedia lists the departments of Müller, the Ulm-based chain, as running from drugstore and perfumery to toys, stationery, books and media. Store networks are published by the companies themselves or counted in dated press reports, so every number in these guides carries its year and its source.

Ownership is often less visible than the brand. Many chains sit inside larger retail groups: Bipa has belonged to the German REWE Group since 1996, and REWE International now lists it in Austria, Croatia and Romania. Others are still run by the company of the person who founded them, as German Wikipedia records for Müller. Corporate pages on founders, owners and retail groups are the starting point for these structures, and they are read here alongside encyclopaedias, registers and the trade press.

Identities change too. In January 2026 the Austrian trade site Leadersnet reported a new corporate design for Bipa, developed by BBDO Wien and built around a single capital B. Each guide sets out what can be checked about a chain — its founder, its owner, its network and its look — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A heart name with the ICA symbol added.

The merger brought a new identity. On 6 May 2015 ICA Gruppen announced that the combined pharmacy business would be called Apotek Hjärtat and given a new graphic profile that includes the ICA symbol as part of the logotype; Swedish Wikipedia likewise says the ICA logo was added to the Apotek Hjärtat logotype at that time. The name joins the Swedish word for pharmacy, apotek, with hjärtat, “the heart”; ICA Gruppen said it had chosen to keep that name rather than replace it, and to add ICA to the logotype instead, so the grocer’s symbol now sits beside the chain’s own wording.

The changeover was planned shop by shop. According to the same announcement, all former Cura units were to be reprofiled from June to the end of 2015, with the remaining pharmacies rebranded with the new logotype during 2016; the opening example was the former Cura pharmacy at Maxi ICA Stormarknad Lindhagen. Apotek Hjärtat’s loyalty card was to be valid in every pharmacy that took the new profile, and the loyalty programmes of ICA and Apotek Hjärtat were to be coordinated during 2016, ICA Gruppen said.

The chain’s present scale comes from its owner. ICA Gruppen’s company profile gives key figures for 2025 of 402 pharmacies and an average of 3,440 employees, and says many of the pharmacies sit next to an ICA store, with others in shopping centres, at healthcare clinics and hospitals, and in towns and rural areas. It also points customers to the apotekhjartat.se website and an app, which it says are open around the clock and offer several delivery options.

For a design guide, Apotek Hjärtat shows how a chain assembled from former state pharmacies built its own name and then made room in its logotype for a parent company’s symbol. Compare Apotek 1, the Norwegian chain whose Swedish pharmacies it bought in 2010, and Matas, another Nordic chain. For this guide we use a warm red, a deep claret and a soft blush with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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