Exki Brand Guidelines: A 2001 Brussels Counter, a Carrot Emblem and a Sole Shareholder

Three former classmates and a Brussels lunch counter.

Exki opened its first restaurant in Brussels in 2001. English Wikipedia dates the opening to 9 January 2001 and says the idea came out of a 1999 reunion of three former classmates: Frédéric Rouvez, Nicolas Steisel and Arnaud de Meeûs. Dutch-language Wikipedia dates the founding of the chain to 2000, a year before that first opening. French and Dutch Wikipedia both place the first restaurant at the Porte de Namur, with a second Brussels restaurant following on the Rue Neuve, the city’s main shopping street, in September 2001.

The name is a play on the French word “exquis,” meaning exquisite, the owners have said, according to English Wikipedia. The company writes it with a lower-case final letter, as EXKi, on its website and signage.

When RTBF, Belgium’s French-language public broadcaster, looked back at the chain in January 2025, it described the starting point plainly: three friends in Brussels who had grown tired of the ordinary sandwich bars in their district at lunchtime, and who aimed the new format at office workers in a hurry. In 2018 the German hospitality site Tageskarte still quoted Nicolas Steisel as one of the chain’s three founders when it reported the opening of its first German restaurant.

Growth came steadily through the 2000s. Exki left Brussels for the first time in January 2002, with a restaurant on De Keyserlei in Antwerp, near the city’s central station, according to Dutch-language Wikipedia. Its first restaurant abroad opened in Turin in 2004, and its first in France in 2006, on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. French Wikipedia adds Luxembourg and the international airports of Brussels and Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle, and both French and Dutch Wikipedia date the move into the Netherlands, at The Hague, to 2011. As of October 2014, English Wikipedia counted 70 restaurants in Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United States.

Seasonal ranges, self-service and a carrot.

The Exki format is a self-service counter. When Tageskarte reported the opening of the chain’s first German restaurant, in central Cologne, in October 2018, it described about 250 square metres of space and a range of around 140 products: salads, sandwiches, focaccias, baguettes, quiches, soups, bakes, pastries, desserts, cakes and fruit, with vegan and vegetarian dishes as a fixed part of the range. Customers choose for themselves from a selection matched to the time of day, and can take everything away or eat in. The menu there was developed by the chef Frank Fohl, the site reported.

The company’s own website keeps to the same vocabulary. Its home page describes “meals inspired by plants, take out or eat in,” and introduces new autumn and winter ranges, with soups and grain bowls named and pictured season by season. It says its restaurants are designed “down to the finest details” around nature and light, and that vegetables are at the centre of its cooking; those are its own descriptions. The website also runs a loyalty programme called the Carrot Club, alongside delivery and franchising pages.

The carrot is the closest thing the chain has to an emblem. RTBF referred to Exki in January 2025 as “the brand with the carrot,” and the loyalty scheme carries the same vegetable in its name. For a design reader, that is the main lesson of the identity: a single, recognisable ingredient used as shorthand for the whole menu, alongside a typed name with an unusual lower-case letter.

The United States was the chain’s furthest reach. English Wikipedia says Exki opened its first American restaurant in June 2014, on Park Avenue South in Manhattan. The New York venture did not last: French Wikipedia dates the closure of its two New York restaurants to December 2016, while Dutch-language Wikipedia gives 2017 for the closing of both and the chain’s full withdrawal from the United States. Dutch-language Wikipedia also dates a restaurant in Barcelona to 2018, the same year as the Cologne opening.

How the chains present themselves.

Europe’s bakery, sandwich, coffee and pizza chains present themselves first through the shop: the fascia over the door, the counter, the bags and cups, and the names of the products on the menu board. Chains in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Finland publish their menus by named ranges, such as sandwiches, salads, pastries and coffee, and their websites usually add a store finder, a loyalty app and a section for prospective franchisees.

Many of these brands sit inside larger groups, and ownership is often the clearest way to read their history. The Barcelona sandwich chain Pans & Company passed from the Catalan food group Agrolimen to the Portuguese restaurant group Ibersol in October 2016, according to Ibersol. In 2014, the agricultural trade paper Agra reported that the industrial baker Neuhauser owned two quick-service chains, Pomme de Pain in France and Crobag in Germany, as the grain group Soufflet took control of it. Pomme de Pain later went back to independence when its managers bought it from InVivo in July 2023, Réussir reported.

Shop networks are published by the companies and counted by the trade press, and the counts change. Franchising can carry a brand abroad, sometimes through a master franchise for a whole country, as Pomme de Pain did in Morocco and Tunisia, according to French Wikipedia; airport and railway-station sites can form a separate channel, such as the travel division through which Ibersol runs Café Pans counters in Spanish airports. A chain’s count of restaurants is therefore always a figure for a given date.

Identity changes are usually reported in the trade press when a refit is unveiled: a new logo, a new typeface, new uniforms and a pilot shop in a symbolic location. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, who founded it, who owns it and how its shops and packaging have changed, and attributes claims to the company where they rest on its own word.

A new shareholder and a smaller network.

The last few years have been harder. In January 2025 RTBF described a company that had been in financial difficulty for several years. Working habits had changed, it said: with remote working, fewer office staff came back for lunch, some Exki restaurants closed, and the market for a quick lunch had become far more crowded than when the chain began. RTBF also reported that the company was concentrating again on its original trade, restaurants in city centres, stations and airports, and that 77 outlets remained at that point.

Ownership changed at the same time. On 23 January 2025 La Libre Belgique reported that, after a capital increase, Iris Belgium, a family office, had become Exki’s sole shareholder. The Liège-area news site L-Post added in November 2025 that Iris Belgium had bought out the stakes held by the Dossche family and by the founder Frédéric Rouvez.

The management changed too. French Wikipedia says Stan Monheim was appointed chief executive in March 2024 and left in September 2025. On 4 November 2025 Exki named Xavier Royaux, a former senior marketing executive at McDonald’s France, as chief executive from early December 2025, L-Post reported, working alongside a new chief operating officer, Pierre Toutel, in post since mid-September 2025. In the same report the company gave its network as 70 restaurants in five European countries, 30 of them in France and 34 in Belgium, counting both company-run and franchised restaurants. As of November 2025, then, France and Belgium together accounted for nearly all of the chain.

For a design guide, Exki shows how a lunch chain can hang its identity on one ingredient and one quirk of spelling, and keep both through changes of owner and management. Compare Le Pain Quotidien, another chain that began in Brussels, and Cojean, a Paris lunch chain of the same era. For this guide we use leaf green, oat cream and a carrot orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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