Inkafarma Brand Guidelines: A 1996 Jockey Plaza Pharmacy That Became InRetail’s Chain

A pharmacy chain that started in a Lima mall.

Inkafarma has operated in Peru since 1996. The Peruvian business site Infomercado, in a history of the chain published in March 2023, says the first pharmacy was opened by Eckerd Perú S.A. — the company now called InRetail Pharma — at the Jockey Plaza shopping centre in Lima. It names the people who led the opening as Miguel Echevarría, who had come to Lima from a buying and management role at the Chilean pharmacy chain Cruz Verde, and Angelo Porcioli, a former general manager of Eckerd Perú.

Infomercado dates the chain’s first pharmacies outside Lima, in Chiclayo and Trujillo on the northern coast, to 2008.

In 2011 the chain was bought by Intercorp, the Peruvian group built around Interbank, Infomercado says. Spanish Wikipedia records that Intercorp’s retail holding was set up that year under the name IFH Pharma Corp., renamed Agora Retail Corp. in May 2012 and InRetail Perú Corp. in July 2012. In 2014 the trade site Perú Retail described InRetail as the Intercorp subsidiary grouping Inkafarma with the Real Plaza malls and the Vivanda and Plaza Vea supermarkets.

That 2014 article also sets out the field Inkafarma competed in: the Química Suiza group with Mifarma, BTL and Fasa, the Albis group with Boticas Arcángel, and Intercorp with Inkafarma — the three main operators in the market, in Perú Retail’s account.

Quicorp, Mifarma and Farmacias Peruanas.

A bigger change came in January 2018. On 27 January, Gestión reported that InRetail Perú had announced the acquisition of Quicorp S.A., the owner of the Mifarma, Fasa and BTL pharmacy chains. Quicorp, founded in 1939 and based in Lima, worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, distribution and retail in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia, and ran around 1,000 pharmacies in Peru and Bolivia, the newspaper said. El Comercio reported the same day that InRetail had told Peru’s securities regulator, the SMV, that it had paid for Quicorp’s assets, and in February 2018 the legal news site LexLatin reported that InRetail had acquired the company under an agreement signed on 26 January.

El Comercio explained the logic of the deal through an Intercorp source: Quicorp brought businesses beyond pharmacy retail — distribution, logistics, pharmaceutical manufacturing and a small convenience-store operation — and operations outside Peru, in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Quicorp’s Química Suiza distribution business came with it. In 2014 Perú Retail had reported that Mifarma had already folded most of its Lima BTL pharmacies into its own name and brought Fasa’s logo into line with Mifarma’s.

The purchase put Inkafarma and Mifarma under one owner. By August 2024, Gestión reported, InRetail’s pharmacy segment — Inkafarma, Mifarma and Quicorp — had 2,373 stores across the country, and close to 40 per cent of its outlets had been converted to new formats; the newspaper also named a beauty-led format, MiFarma Beauty, for the sister brand. In December 2025 Gestión described Farmacias Peruanas as the Intercorp company that runs both Inkafarma and Mifarma, and reported that InRetail had reached 2,486 pharmacies across Peru, counting both chains, in the third quarter of 2025.

The chain’s supply runs through large warehouses. The same December 2025 Gestión report said Farmacias Peruanas had begun operating a new distribution centre of 85,000 square metres at Punta Negra, south of Lima, able to prepare more than a million units a day for shipment to its pharmacies across the country.

Its own website today names services such as round-the-clock pharmacies (“Boticas 24 horas”), home delivery, a telephone ordering line called Inkafono and the Inkaclub loyalty programme, and links to partner Intercorp businesses including Real Plaza and Vivanda.

Retail and documentation.

Colombia, Peru and Argentina have large retail chains that grew from a single shop into national networks, and most of them present themselves first through their formats. A company’s own pages usually set out its hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount stores, department stores, home-improvement centres and pharmacies as separate banners, each with its own name and fascia. In Colombia, Olímpica’s formats were listed in 2024 by El Heraldo as supertiendas, superalmacenes, superdroguerías and droguerías, while Grupo Éxito runs the Éxito and Carulla banners and the Viva shopping centres, according to Spanish Wikipedia.

Own-label ranges carry much of the identity inside the shop. Grupo Éxito sells its own clothing labels, People, Arkitect and Bronzini, El Colombiano reported in March 2024, and Olímpica has private labels across supermarket, textile, appliance, technology and home categories, according to El Heraldo. Seasonal campaigns, printed leaflets and anniversary promotions are published on the chains’ websites next to store finders and online shops.

Ownership is part of the story, and it often crosses borders. Grupo Éxito passed from the French group Casino to the Salvadoran Grupo Calleja through tender offers that closed in January 2024, according to the company’s own filing, and in March 2026 its Argentine subsidiary agreed to hand twelve stores to the Patagonian chain La Anónima. Several Peruvian chains belong to wider groups, and each guide here names the owner with the date a source gives.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders and founding dates, stock-exchange listings and investor filings, and the family holding companies behind many of the chains. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand from dated press, registers and the companies’ own filings, and keeps company descriptions marked as the company’s own word.

A chain on Peru’s street corners.

Inkafarma has also been the subject of a competition finding. El Comercio recalled in January 2018 that in 2016 Indecopi, Peru’s competition and consumer agency, sanctioned Inkafarma, Arcángel, Fasa, Mifarma and Nortfarma for coordinating price increases on 36 products between January 2008 and March 2009. The newspaper reported that the chains accepted the decision and did not appeal, and that Inkafarma did not yet belong to Intercorp during the period of the infringement.

The scale of the chain is documented mostly through its owner’s reporting. Its stores are counted together with Mifarma’s in InRetail’s quarterly results, and Infomercado in 2023 put Inkafarma alone at more than 1,000 pharmacies across Peru’s 25 regions. InRetail Perú, whose shares form part of the S&P/BVL Peru General index, Spanish Wikipedia says, reports food retail, pharmacy and shopping malls as its three segments on its investor site; Promart and Oechsle, also Intercorp chains, sit outside it.

The brand’s name runs through its services: Infomercado names its points schemes for frequent customers as InkaPuntos and InkaClub, and the website adds Inkafono and Inkapacks. In 2023 the same site described a long-running low-price message in its advertising, and said the chain had built up its personal-care range with in-store skin-care advisers.

For a design guide, Inkafarma shows how a pharmacy chain can hold one name across thousands of small outlets while sharing a back office with a sister brand. Compare Plaza Vea, the InRetail supermarket chain grouped with Inkafarma since the early 2010s, and Promart, Intercorp’s home-improvement chain. For this guide we use a counter blue, an ink blue and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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