Celli Brand Guidelines: Rimini’s 1974 Beer-Tap Maker, Ardian-Owned Since 2019

A Rimini cooling firm that turned to the beer tap.

Celli began in Rimini, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, in 1974. The company’s heritage page gives its first name as Frigotecnica Celli and says it made its name in dispensing and cooling beer and soft drinks; the investment firm Ardian, announcing its purchase of the business in February 2019, also gives Rimini and 1974 as its place and year of founding. The company was built by the Celli family, which still held a stake in 2019, Ardian’s announcement says.

For its first three decades Celli stayed in the Rimini area. In 2009, the company says, it moved its headquarters a few kilometres south to San Giovanni in Marignano, in the province of Rimini, a step it describes as the start of a new phase of expansion. The site there is the group’s headquarters and, according to its list of plants, specialises in sheet-metal work and the making of dispense systems for beer and soft drinks.

Outside money arrived in 2013, when the Italian private equity firm Consilium took a holding, the company says. In Ardian’s 2019 announcement, the then chairman and chief executive, Mauro Gallavotti, said the period with Consilium had given the company a manager-led approach. By then, Ardian said, Celli had moved from a focus on products and components to supplying complete systems for cold-drink dispensing, with installation, testing and maintenance handled through a network of service centres and exclusive distributors, and exports to more than 100 countries.

Cobra, FC4 and the bespoke font.

Celli’s visible products are the pieces that stand on a bar. Its catalogue groups them into beer fonts, taps, under-counter and counter-top coolers, freestanding units, cask pumps and digital systems. The company calls the Cobra font one of its most iconic and historic lines, with a curving form; it describes the Brauhaus font as its industrial-style column, and the FC4 as its iconic tap, a standard beer tap with an original Celli flow compensator. The Celtic tap is designed for British-style continuous pouring, and the Globus is a ball tap with a front opening for beer or wine. Angram cask pumps come in a traditional form and a newer version the company calls Cylinderless.

Much of Celli’s work is made for brewers’ own brands. Ardian named the breweries it supplied in 2019 as including Heineken, Carlsberg, Asahi, Molson Coors and Budweiser, alongside Coca-Cola and Pepsi on the soft-drinks side. Celli’s bespoke range, drawn up with its British design studio ADS2 and the Spanish font maker JJL, includes custom fonts for Kronenbourg 1664, Tennent’s and Magners; the company says the Kronenbourg font alone is assembled from 19 separate shaped parts, lit along internal gold bands with no visible LED points.

The group has also moved past beer. Ardian’s announcement noted that Celli made water dispensers and had recently launched an in-house platform to manage installed dispensers remotely, which it called an Internet of Things approach for the sector. Celli now presents digital and interactive fonts alongside its classic columns, and its water range under the Celli name.

The category.

Beverage dispensing makers sell to two very different counters. In a pub or bar, the visible parts are the font on the bar top and the tap handles fixed to it, which usually carry the brewer’s branding while the equipment maker’s name sits on the hardware underneath. In a quick-service restaurant, the visible part is the post-mix tower or self-serve dispenser, where drink brands and, more and more, touchscreens take over the front panel.

Most of the machinery is out of sight, so the makers explain it on paper. Catalogues and spec sheets lean on cutaway diagrams of coolers, carbonators and insulated beer lines, on line drawings and wiring diagrams, and on photographs of keg cellars and cold rooms where kegs, gas cylinders and couplers are connected. The literature is written for installers, service technicians and distributors as much as for the owner of the bar.

The trade meets at shows. The National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago gathers foodservice equipment, including fountain dispensers and ice machines; BrauBeviale in Nuremberg covers brewing and the wider beverage supply chain; and the Craft Brewers Conference in the United States brings draught-system suppliers face to face with brewers. Makers also name certifications, audits and sustainability ratings in their own newsrooms, as Lancer does with its ISO certificates.

Ownership often runs through larger groups. Lancer has been part of the Japanese refrigeration maker Hoshizaki since 2006, according to Hoshizaki’s corporate history, and Cornelius went to Berkshire Hathaway when the British engineering group IMI agreed to sell it in 2013, according to English Wikipedia; its website now says it is powered by Marmon Foodservice Technologies. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

From a family firm to a private equity-owned group.

On 11 February 2019 Ardian announced a binding agreement to acquire 100 per cent of Celli S.p.A. from Consilium and the Celli family, with senior management reinvesting alongside it. At the time Ardian counted five manufacturing plants in Italy and the United Kingdom and more than 400 employees. Celli’s own heritage page describes the 2019 deal as a complete acquisition by Ardian, and names Federico Testarella as chief executive.

Acquisitions have shaped the group. The company lists Cosmetal, a water-dispenser maker founded in Recanati in the late 1950s, which joined in 2016; CAB of Pozzuoli, founded in 1986, for frozen drinks and granita machines; and, in Britain, Angram, whose cask-ale hand pumps it sells under the Angram name, and ADS2, a design studio in Biggleswade. In Spain it added Reyvarsur of Seville, founded in 1974 as Reductores y Variadores del Sur, which the company says turned to beer dispense after it began working with the Seville brewery Cruz del Campo, and JJL of Madrid. The Seville plant now makes pressure regulators and keg couplers, and the British site at Thirsk, in North Yorkshire, makes cask pumps, bespoke fonts and taps, with its own moulding and printing. Celli’s plant list now names eight production sites, three in Italy, two in Britain, two in Spain and one at Pont-Remy in France, while its heritage page gives nine; it has sales offices in Germany, Singapore and the United States, the last in New York.

The company says its dispense systems are made entirely in Italy, and it presents itself as an Italian design-led maker for international drinks brands.

For a design guide, Celli shows how a supplier can put other companies’ brands at the centre of its products while keeping its own name on the tap. Compare Micro Matic, a Danish group that has also grown by acquisition, and Lindr, a Czech maker of drink coolers and dispense towers. For this guide we use an Adriatic brick, a foam white and a brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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