Haifa Group Brand Guidelines: Haifa Chemicals, Potassium Nitrate & a Negev Plant

Two state companies, Dead Sea potash and a plant on the Kishon.

Haifa Group began as Haifa Chemicals, set up in 1966 by a partnership of two Israeli government companies: the oil refiner Oil Refineries, with three quarters of the shares, and Israel Mining Industries, with the rest, Hebrew Wikipedia says. The plan was to make potassium nitrate and phosphoric acid from potash taken from the Dead Sea and phosphate rock from the Negev. The company took its name from the city where its first plant was built, in Haifa Bay on the banks of the Kishon river, next to the refineries.

The plant was designed by the French engineering firm Krebs, Hebrew Wikipedia says, and the project was seen at the time as a risk, because it used a process that had not yet been tried at industrial scale. Construction was completed in February 1969, but faults found during commissioning delayed the start; production began in November 1969. The plant reached profitability in 1973, and in 1974 the company decided to double its capacity.

Ownership moved out of state hands in stages. In 1975 the finance minister proposed selling the government’s shares; attempts to find a foreign buyer failed, and in July 1978 the company’s shares were listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. In April 1980 the refineries sold a stake of just over a quarter to a Chicago company, which decided in 1985 to sell again. Those shares went to a group of American investors organised by the businessman Arie Genger, and at the end of June 1986 the group also bought the refineries’ remaining stake, according to Hebrew Wikipedia, which notes that the sale was criticised in the Israeli press at the time.

The company’s exports were recognised early on: it was named an outstanding exporter in 1972 and, in 1992, a senior outstanding exporter by Israel’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, Hebrew Wikipedia records.

A second plant in the Negev, and a change of control in 2008.

In 1994 the company completed a second Israeli plant, Haifa Chemicals South, in the Mishor Rotem industrial zone south of Arad and east of Dimona. Abroad, Hebrew Wikipedia lists a plant at Lunel in the south of France, and further plants in the United States and Canada.

The holding structure changed again in September 2008, when the Trump Group, owned by Jules Trump and his family, took control of the American holding company TRI and with it control of Haifa Chemicals, Hebrew Wikipedia says. In August 2017 the Israeli business paper Globes named Jules Trump as the company’s controlling shareholder.

The Haifa plant also carried an environmental record. Hebrew Wikipedia says the company was convicted in 2005, on its own admission, of discharging pollutants into the Kishon and the sea beyond permitted levels on several dates in 2001 and 2002, and that a wastewater treatment plant brought in in 2001 reduced its discharges into the river.

The turning point came with the plant’s ammonia tank in Haifa Bay, built in 1989, which held imported ammonia used by both Israeli plants. After years of public campaigning for its removal, a Haifa court ordered it closed at the city’s request in February 2017, and in May 2017 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that it must be emptied for good; Hebrew Wikipedia says the emptying was finished in September 2017. On 2 August 2017, Globes reported, management told workers that the northern factory was closing and that the southern plant would close too, with about 800 jobs to go across both sites; there had been no production since the ammonia supply stopped in March. Chemistry World reported the same announcement. The Haifa plant did not reopen: Hebrew Wikipedia says it closed in 2017 because of the city’s opposition, and that the company decided to expand at Mishor Rotem instead.

Design and documentation.

Fertiliser companies sell something most people never see up close: granules, prills and crystals that leave a mine or a chemical plant in bulk and end up spread across fields. Their visual language tries to bridge that distance. A familiar image is a handful of granules held in open palms, which turns a commodity into something a farmer can weigh and judge, and links the product to the people who use it.

The second register is the field. Corporate reports and websites in this sector lean on green crops, wide horizons and drone shots looking straight down on rows of maize, rice or vines. These images speak to growers and investors at once: they show the end use of the product, and they suggest scale without showing a single factory.

The third register is industrial. Open-pit mines, conveyor belts, evaporation ponds, acid plants and port terminals with ships at the quay appear alongside the fields, because extraction and logistics are the business. Packaging carries the brand into the farmyard: printed sacks and big bags, often with a crop icon, a nutrient formula and a product-range name on the front. Trade events such as the International Fertilizer Association’s Annual Conference add another stage, with stands, lanyards and presentation decks.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it was founded, who owns it, where it mines and makes its products, and how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown here are our own unofficial interpretations, not official brand assets.

From Haifa Bay to Mishor Rotem.

In December 2018 Haifa Chemicals said it would build its own ammonia plant at Mishor Rotem, so that it would no longer need to import and move ammonia, and in December 2020 the group signed a contract with the Italian engineering company Saipem to build it, with a planned output of about 100,000 tonnes a year, according to Hebrew Wikipedia. In August 2024 a rail spur to the Mishor Rotem plant, now run as Haifa Negev Technologies, was completed. In October 2023 the market analyst CRU described Haifa Chemicals as a significant producer and exporter of potassium nitrate from its Mishor Rotem site, estimated that it accounted for 17% of world potassium nitrate exports in 2022, and noted its plans for a new ammonia tank after the old one in Haifa Bay was forced to close.

Today the company trades as Haifa Group and calls itself “a global leading supplier of specialty plant nutrition.” Its product families are potassium nitrate fertilisers, water-soluble fertilisers for fertigation, controlled-release fertilisers and granular NPK fertilisers, alongside food phosphates and industrial grades. Its website describes 19 subsidiaries, production sites in Israel, France and Canada, and blending facilities in Brazil and South Africa, selling to growers in more than 100 countries; another passage on the same page still speaks of four production facilities, including one in the US. The site also offers crop guides and nutrition calculators for growers. In 2019 the company joined the UN Global Compact, Hebrew Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Haifa Group shows how a company named after a city can keep that name after leaving it. Compare ICL, which CRU names alongside Haifa as Israel’s other fertiliser producer, and SQM. For this guide we use a bay blue, a sand and a crop green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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