Petit Forestier Brand Guidelines: A 1907 Paris Family Firm Built on Refrigerated Rental

Live-animal transport, then a market firm called Petit.

Petit Forestier rents refrigerated vans and trucks, refrigerated display cabinets and cold containers, and builds refrigerated bodies through its own subsidiaries. The group dates its origins to 1907, when, its history page says, Zéphirin Forestier set up Transports Forestier Frères in Paris to carry live animals. His son Jean Forestier joined the business in 1931. The sources used for this guide do not say how Transports Forestier Frères operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

The name came from a purchase. In 1956, the group says, Transports Forestier Frères bought a company called Petit, based at the La Villette market in Paris beside the former abattoirs, and the two names have stayed together since. In 1965 Jean Forestier began renting refrigerated vehicles without a driver, a service the group still describes as its core business. From 1966 the company concentrated on full-service refrigerated rental; its website lists that service today as assistance around the clock, maintenance and repair, insurance, paperwork, vehicle personalisation and telematics.

A national network came next. In 1975, the group says, Yves Forestier began building branches across France, starting in Bordeaux with Jean-François Joulia, while Jean-Claude Forestier joined to speed up the expansion; a branch in Rouen followed in 1980. In 1991 the company added refrigerated containers. It opened its first Belgian branch in 1996 and a Luxembourg subsidiary in 1997, bought the firm Stricher in 1998 and opened in the Netherlands in 1999 — the year it was listed on the Second Marché of the Paris stock exchange.

The group also began building what it rents. In 2000 it bought Lecapitaine, which it calls the third-ranked French builder of refrigerated bodies at the time, and opened its first Spanish branch; in 2001 it bought Relec Froid, a maker of refrigeration units. It bought Via Truck Rental in the United Kingdom in 2003, launched a semi-trailer brand in 2004 and entered Poland in 2005 by buying Rider CFM.

A family group that left the stock market at 100.

The company has stayed in family hands. In 2006 it moved into Switzerland and Portugal and bought Pro System, a renter of refrigerated cabinets, adding display furniture to its vehicles and containers. In 2007, the year of its centenary, it left the stock market, the group says. Le Figaro, reporting with AFP in January 2017, described Petit Forestier as a family group specialising in refrigerated-vehicle rental. Today Léonard Forestier chairs its management board, the Directoire, and an external strategic council is chaired by Laurent Derolez, according to the group’s governance page.

In 2016 the company tried to grow through one large deal. Le Figaro reported that Petit Forestier had announced exclusive negotiations in June 2016 with CVC Capital Partners and Eurazeo, the main shareholders of the commercial-vehicle renter Fraikin, and that staff representatives approved the plan in July. Competition authorities in Spain and Poland cleared it, but France’s Autorité de la concurrence asked for structural commitments, and when it judged the measures offered insufficient, Petit Forestier dropped the deal, announcing the decision on 19 January 2017. The company said at the time that keeping its own sites and Fraikin’s network intact had always been its priority.

Smaller acquisitions followed abroad, by the group’s own account. It lists Mendon Trucks Leasing and Rental in the United States, Igloocar in Poland and a first site in South Africa in 2018; Reftrade, a container specialist, and San Marcial in Spain in 2019; Medfood in Italy, Ice Concept in Belgium and Freezerent in the United Kingdom in 2022–2023; Eurocold in Australia in 2024; and Groupe Lagüe in Canada in 2025. Earlier openings included Italy, through the purchase of Fuel Only, in 2009, Morocco in 2010, the Czech Republic in 2016 and Austria in 2017.

Fleets, depots and portals.

Truck, trailer and refrigerated-vehicle leasing firms sell something customers mostly see on the road: the vehicle itself. Their fleets carry the company name and colours across highways, depots and delivery yards, so the livery does much of the work an advertising campaign would do elsewhere. Penske Truck Rental, for example, describes its rental fleet as yellow trucks with blue stripes, while English Wikipedia describes Ryder’s commercial rental vehicles as white trucks.

Colour also helps sort a fleet. Companies in this field often separate their brands by service, keeping a consumer rental name apart from a leasing or logistics name, and some publish photographs of tractors, box trucks, refrigerated bodies and trailers lined up at their own depots. Those depot images, along with maintenance bays and wash lanes, appear on company websites and in press releases.

Much of the customer relationship now runs through software. Leasing companies publish online booking for rental vehicles, mobile apps for drivers and fleet managers, and customer portals that show maintenance schedules, vehicle data and invoices. Penske names its system Fleet Insight, and Ryder has introduced apps and platforms under names such as RyderGyde and COOP, according to English Wikipedia.

Corporate pages tend to stress scale and ownership. These firms often list how many vehicles they manage and how many maintenance locations they run, and they set out who owns them, from family holdings to listed parents, joint ventures and investment funds. In this guide, fleet and location counts are given only as a dated source states them, and each brand’s owners are named as of the time of writing.

Industry, rental and a second life.

The group now presents itself as three activities: industry, building refrigerated bodies through Lecapitaine and Igloocar; rental of refrigerated vehicles, cabinets and containers, with a smaller dry-vehicle offer under the Zefirent name; and resale and recycling through Reways. Its rental brands include Petit Forestier itself, Stricher Froid in the Paris region, Mendon in New York and New Jersey, SV Noleggio in Italy, Freezerent in the United Kingdom and Eurocold in Australia. Its rental website said in November 2026 that it ran 350 branches with 83,000 refrigerated vehicles, 51,000 refrigerated cabinets and 5,700 containers for more than 15,000 customers; the group site gives 5,900 employees and a presence in 24 countries, and calls the group the European leader in refrigerated rental.

Its fleet has also moved towards electric power. Flottes Automobiles reported in September 2022 that Iveco, at the IAA show in Hanover, announced an order from Petit Forestier for 2,000 chassis-cabs of its battery-electric eDaily, to carry refrigerated bodies from the Urban range of its subsidiary Lecapitaine, and that the renter had earlier run Iveco’s natural-gas vehicles. The group’s own programmes on lower-carbon cold transport are called Cool for Good and Cool Lab.

For a design guide, Petit Forestier shows how a family name, joined to the name of a firm bought in 1956, can become the label for a single specialism — rented cold — across fleets on several continents. Compare Fraikin, the French commercial-vehicle renter it tried to buy, and Penske Truck Leasing in the United States. For this guide we use a frost white, a glacier blue and a deep ink blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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