Herfy Brand Guidelines: Riyadh’s 1981 Burger Chain, a Lamb Logo and an Arabic Letter

A Riyadh burger counter beside a supermarket.

Herfy Food Services Company traces its start to 1981, when the first Herfy restaurant opened in Riyadh. Saudipedia, the Saudi encyclopaedia, gives that date in an entry dated September 2023, and Arab News gave the same year in 2021; a 2024 Arab News report gave 1982 instead, the year Saudipedia assigns to the company’s bakeries. The founder was Ahmed Hamad Al Saeed, a businessman who, Argaam reported in January 2015, had earlier worked in real estate and shipping.

The idea came from abroad. In a long profile published by Nation’s Restaurant News in December 2012, Al Saeed said he first ate a hamburger in 1972, while studying for a master’s degree in Los Angeles. The first restaurant opened next to a Panda supermarket, as what he called a joint project with the owners of that grocery chain, which had started in the late 1970s.

The name is local. Al Saeed told the magazine that “herfy” is the regional Arabic word for “the small local sheep,” chosen for its link to young, tender meat; Argaam glossed it in 2015 as a baby sheep. The magazine reported that some early customers at the neighbouring supermarket took the restaurant for a butcher’s shop, although the beef was then imported from the United States. Al Saeed also told Nation’s Restaurant News that the Riyadh chain has no connection with Herfy’s, a namesake chain in the American Pacific Northwest.

Ownership followed Panda. Saudipedia says Panda’s stake in Herfy passed to Kingdom Holding Company in 1994, and that after Azizia Panda merged with the Savola Group in 1998, Herfy became part of Savola. In January 2015 Argaam reported that up to 70 percent of Herfy was then held by Azizia Panda United.

From a lamb’s head to an Arabic letter.

Herfy’s mark has changed more than once, and the changes are set out in Al Saeed’s own account to Nation’s Restaurant News. For more than the chain’s first decade, the logo was a photograph: he said he bought a black-and-white lamb at the livestock market and took it to an advertising agency, which photographed its head. When Kingdom Holding became a partner in 1993, by his account, the executives revised the logo to avoid confusion, arriving at “something between a lamb and a cow.”

Around 2004 — “eight years” before the 2012 profile — the mark became a stylised form of the Arabic letter h, which, Al Saeed noted, also resembles a hamburger. The magazine described that letterform as a distinctive feature of Herfy’s red-and-white signage and trade dress. A consultant who worked with the company in 1993 told the magazine that the restaurants’ trade dress had then been mixed, because much of the furniture and equipment came from the United States, and that it was brought into line.

The menu has grown around burgers and chicken. The 2012 profile named the Super Herfy burger, the Super Chili Chicken and the spicy Chicken Tortilla wrap as signatures, and quoted the director of operations as saying that the chain began with hamburgers, later added bone-in chicken, and that chicken had become its main category. That year 104 of its restaurants had drive-through lanes, the magazine reported. The National, in April 2012, reported that Herfy had added jumbo hot dogs to its menu and had opened a casual-dining restaurant, similar to a steakhouse, in Riyadh.

Behind the counters sits a supply business. Saudipedia records the bakeries from 1982, a meat processing and production plant that began operating in 2005, and a cake and pastry factory set up in 2011 to make bread, croissants and pastries. The company’s own website lists restaurants, bakeries, meat and poultry factories, and catering as its sectors.

Design and documentation.

The fast-food chains of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon include several that began as a single restaurant in one city. ALBAIK dates itself to a Jeddah chicken shop opened in 1974 and took its present name in 1986; Kudu opened its first sandwich counter in Riyadh in April 1988. Their histories are told in two places: the companies’ own “our story” pages, and the business press of the Gulf and beyond.

What the companies publish about themselves is often bilingual: ALBAIK’s and Kudu’s websites, for example, run in English and Arabic, with the name set in Latin capitals. Menus are presented by named dishes and meals rather than by price lists: fried-chicken meals and garlic sauce, made-to-order sandwiches and burgers, shawarma wraps, falafel, man’oushe flatbreads and mixed grills, depending on the chain. Open kitchens, drive-throughs, food-court counters and petrol-station units appear as formats in their own right.

Restaurant networks are often counted by the companies themselves, so the numbers change with the date of the page. Expansion abroad often runs through partners: ALBAIK entered the UAE in 2021 with an Abu Dhabi operator, and Kudu opened its first franchise outside Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in 2026. Ownership can change too: Kudu passed from family ownership to private-equity investors in 2015 and to a regional investment group in 2022.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain — who founded it, who owns it, where it trades and which dishes it names — and attributes what rests only on the company’s word. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, and no logo, sign or packaging is reproduced.

A listed Riyadh company with franchise partners abroad.

Herfy is a listed company. Saudipedia says it joined the Saudi Exchange, Saudi Tadawul, in February 2010, under the symbol 6002. Savola has remained a major holder: in August and November 2024 Argaam reported Savola’s stake at 49 percent, and in October 2024 Arab News gave the same figure and called Savola Herfy’s biggest shareholder.

The network has grown in steps, each count tied to its date. The National reported 192 outlets at the end of the first quarter of 2012. Arab News reported in 2021 that, as of September 2020, the company owned 40 restaurants and leased 345. Saudipedia, in September 2023, gave more than 380 restaurants and more than six thousand employees; the company’s website, updated in 2025, shows more than 368 restaurants and more than 6,000 employees.

Abroad, Herfy has worked through franchise partners. In 2012 Nation’s Restaurant News counted seven licensed units in Kuwait, four in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain. Arab News reported that Herfy opened its first franchised branch outside the Middle East in Bangladesh in December 2017, under a 2016 agreement with Greenland Services, and its fifth Bangladeshi restaurant in February 2021, supplying franchisees there with meat, chicken and sauces made in its Saudi factories. In May 2021 it signed a franchise agreement with EatRite Food Services for Nigeria, Arab News reported. Saudipedia’s 2023 entry names franchises in Kuwait and Bangladesh.

For a design guide, Herfy shows how a mark can move from a photograph of a lamb to a single Arabic letter while the name keeps its local meaning. Compare Kudu, another Riyadh fast-food chain, and Burger King, the American burger chain. For this guide we use a signal red, a warm white and a charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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