Cruz Verde Brand Guidelines: A 1984 Viña del Mar Pharmacy, Socofar and FEMSA Salud

A coastal-city pharmacy and a holding group called Socofar.

Cruz Verde, Spanish for “green cross,” is a pharmacy chain that began in Viña del Mar, the resort city on Chile’s Pacific coast, in 1984. According to the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo, writing in March 2023, the businessman Guillermo Harding set up a branch in the centre of Viña del Mar and then took the chain to other parts of Chile. The EMIS company database records the operating company, Farmacias Cruz Verde, as incorporated on 2 January 1984, with its main office now in Santiago.

The chain grew inside a larger group, Socofar, which the Santiago business paper Diario Financiero described in 2015 as linked to Harding, and which also ran the beauty and perfume chain Maicao. When the Mexican group FEMSA described Socofar in August 2015, it said the company had been founded in 1949 and operated 643 pharmacies under the Cruz Verde name and 154 beauty shops under the Maicao name in Chile, Perú Retail reported. Maicao is older than Cruz Verde: Diario Financiero reported in June 2024 that it dates from 1982, when it opened a shop in the Meiggs trading district of Estación Central, in Santiago.

Colombia came next. El Tiempo says the Farmasanitas pharmacies, then part of the Sanitas health group, split off in 2012 and looked for a partner, and that the first Cruz Verde shop in Colombia opened the following year in Bogotá’s Centro Internacional district. More branches followed in other parts of the country from the second quarter of 2014, the paper says, and the chain also took over pharmacy points inside Cencosud supermarkets in the capital.

From Socofar to FEMSA Salud.

Ownership changed in two steps. On 14 August 2015 FEMSA, Fomento Económico Mexicano, the Monterrey group behind the OXXO convenience stores, announced an agreement to buy 60 per cent of Socofar, and Diario Financiero reported on 24 September 2015 that the purchase had closed the day before. At that time, the paper said, the Chilean group ran about 640 pharmacies and 150 beauty shops in Chile and about 150 pharmacies in Colombia. FEMSA already had a pharmacy business in Mexico, having bought a majority of the YZA chain in 2013 and also running Farmacias Moderna, Perú Retail noted; FEMSA said Socofar also brought it a distribution business serving other pharmacies.

Speaking in Mexico on the day of the announcement, Harding told Diario Financiero that the group had spent about a year looking for a partner with which to expand in Latin America. Chile’s competition authority, the Fiscalía Nacional Económica, closed its review of the deal without objection, finding that the two groups did not operate in the same geographic markets, Perú Retail reported in 2015.

The second step came four years later. On 23 December 2019 Diario Financiero reported that Socofar’s minority shareholder had exercised an option to sell its remaining 40 per cent to FEMSA, which would then become the sole shareholder, and that the founding Chilean shareholders led by Harding would leave the company; FEMSA said it expected the sale to close in January 2020. El Tiempo wrote in March 2023 that FEMSA had acquired all of Socofar’s shares.

The chain now sits inside FEMSA Salud, the group’s health division, which Diario Financiero named in 2024 as the parent of Cruz Verde. In Colombia, El Tiempo counted 650 Cruz Verde points of sale across 26 departments as of March 2023, after the purchases of the Acuña drugstores, of Punto Farma in 2018 and of Multidrogas in 2022.

Design and documentation.

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.

Three pharmacy names under one owner.

In Chile the network has kept growing. Diario Financiero reported on 27 October 2025 that Cruz Verde had passed 830 locations in the country, and The Clinic gave the same figure on 3 November 2025. Maicao has changed as well: by May 2024 about 100 of its roughly 170 shops had added a pharmacy counter under a “Perfumería + Farmacia” format, Diario Financiero reported, and by October 2025 the paper put the converted shops at about 120.

FEMSA Salud has since added a third chain in Chile. In October 2025 it opened the first Super Sana shop, a low-cost format, in Estación Central, Santiago. Diario Financiero reported that the format uses smaller shops and a lighter operating structure, with a range of about 1,400 products, and that it follows formats the group already runs in Ecuador as Sana Sana and in Colombia as Rana que Sana. The Clinic noted that the new chain greets shoppers with a costumed frog mascot. That leaves FEMSA Salud with three separate names in Chile: Cruz Verde, Maicao and Super Sana.

The Cruz Verde name has travelled with the business. In Chile it has stood beside Maicao since both were part of Socofar, and both names were still in use under FEMSA in 2025, Diario Financiero reported. In Colombia the Farmasanitas business opened its first shops under the Cruz Verde name in 2013, according to El Tiempo.

For a design guide, Cruz Verde shows how a pharmacy name from one Chilean coastal city can cross borders and outlast two changes of ownership. Compare Walgreens, whose group controlled the rival Chilean chain Farmacias Ahumada in 2015, Perú Retail reported, and Mercury Drug, a pharmacy chain from the Philippines. For this guide we use a deep green, a leaf green and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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