Quala Brand Guidelines: The 1980 Bogotá Maker of Frutiño, La Sopera and Doña Gallina

A Bogotá consumer-goods company of 1980.

Quala is a Colombian consumer-goods company based in Bogotá. It dates itself to 1980: its website history says the company began that year when a group of people came together to make and sell food in Colombia, and the French trade title Premium Beauty News gave the same founding year in May 2017. Portafolio, interviewing its president Michel de Rhodes in December 2013, described a company with 33 years of operations behind it, which points back to the same date.

Its early products were powders. Quala’s history pages say the success of Instacrem led it to launch Baticrema in 1981 and Batilado a year later, which the company describes as its entry into markets held by large multinationals. In 1983, the company says, it moved to larger premises in Bogotá and used its experience with powdered products to launch Quipitos, a sweet aimed at children that took Quala into neighbourhood shops, the company says, and widened its range of customers.

Soups and drinks followed. In 1986 Quala bought the Hogareña brand and launched La Sopera, its entry into packaged soups, with flavours and portion sizes the company says were shaped for Colombian families. In 1989 it moved into powdered soft drinks with Fresco Frutiño, which it describes as a new concept with more flavours and a different pack. The Frutiño name later stretched to a gelatine dessert, launched in June 1992.

The 1990s added stock and a new home. Quala launched Doña Gallina, a chicken stock, in 1996. In January 1997 it moved into its own headquarters in the Venecia district of south Bogotá, a site the company says was built with production plants alongside the offices, and in the same period it launched FamiliaYá, an instant drink powder that began with an orange flavour and later added others.

Food brands, and a 2017 sale.

The 2000s widened the range. The company’s timeline lists Activade, a powdered drink, in 2000, and Del Fogón seasonings, described as made the old way, in September of that year. Ricostilla, a rib-flavoured stock cube, followed in 2003, and Gelagurt, a dessert that mixes gelatine and yoghurt, in 2004. In 2005 Quala launched Yogoso under its BonIce ice-pop name, along with a fruit pulp called Pulpifruta.

It also moved beyond food. In 2004, the company says, it entered personal care with Savital shampoo, and its timeline later adds Aromatel for home care in 2012 and the Bioexpert hair-care brand in 2014. Those non-food lines became the subject of a major change in the company’s shape.

In May 2017 Unilever agreed to buy Quala’s personal-care and home-care portfolio. Premium Beauty News listed the brands as Savital (sold as Savilé in some markets), the men’s hair brand eGo, Bio-Expert, the oral-care brand Fortident and the fabric conditioner Aromatel. El Heraldo quoted Quala’s president saying that after a strategic review the company had decided to focus its efforts and resources on its most important businesses, and El País of Cali wrote that Quala had let those brands go to focus on food and snacks. El Espectador reported at the time that the sale covered every country where those brands were sold, and that the deal still had regulatory steps to clear. The Hungarian trade title Trademagazin reported in March 2018 that Unilever had completed the purchase.

The sale left Quala as a food and drinks company. As of November 2026, its Colombian website groups its brands into drinks, culinary products and desserts and snacks, with names including Frutiño, Doña Gallina, La Sopera and BonIce.

Design and documentation.

The food brands in this group sit on supermarket shelves across Brazil, Colombia and Argentina: milk, cheese, biscuits, coffee, sauces and other pantry staples bought week after week. Their identities are built for that setting. Cartons, tins, jars and packets carry the brand name in large type, named ranges sit under one master brand, and television campaigns often put a well-known face beside the pack, as Piracanjuba did with the singer Ivete Sangalo, according to the O Povo advertising column in 2020.

Many of these names began as small regional firms and took the name of a town, a region or a family. Piracanjuba is named after the Goiás town where it began as a butter maker in 1955, and that town’s name comes from a Tupi-Guarani word for a fish of the cerrado. A single company can also own several brands at once, some built from scratch and some bought in, as Grupo Piracanjuba does with Piracanjuba, LeitBom and Emana, according to Exame and the company.

Ownership takes several forms. Some brands belong to family-owned companies that do not publish accounts; others belong to listed food groups or to multinationals; and brands also move between owners through purchases, licences and court-supervised sales. Valor Econômico reported in 2019 that Nestlé licensed its Ninho and Molico milk brands to the company behind Piracanjuba, and Globo Rural reported in 2015 that Italac’s owner bought the Nilza brand after its former company’s bankruptcy.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it today, where it makes its products and how its range and campaigns are presented. Ownership changes are given with their dates, and anything that rests only on a company’s own corporate pages is attributed to the company.

Bogotá, and a regional network.

Quala works across Latin America through national companies. In 2017 Premium Beauty News listed ten countries where it had a strong presence: Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. As of November 2026, its Colombian website describes a consumer-goods multinational present in eight countries of Central and South America, and links to separate sites for Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

The company’s timeline for the years after 2010 includes SunTea, a powdered tea, in 2010 and a bottled version in 2013; Don Gustico and the ready-to-drink Vive 100 in 2012; and Popetas popcorn under the BonIce name in 2013. In 2016 came Saviloe, a drink with aloe pieces and a fruit flavour. More recent launches use panela, the unrefined cane sugar found in kitchens across Colombia: Panelada, a panela drink with lemon flavour to serve cold or hot, in 2021, and Panelista, a panela drink to prepare at home, in 2022.

Many of the brand names are plain Spanish kitchen words. Del Fogón means “from the stove,” La Sopera is a soup tureen and Doña Gallina pairs a title of respect with the word for hen, while the corporate name Quala sits above them on the company’s sites rather than on the front of each product range.

For a design guide, Quala shows a corporate name that stays in the background while dozens of everyday product names do the selling, from dessert powders in 1981 to panela drinks in 2022. Compare Unilever, which bought Quala’s personal-care and home-care brands in 2017–2018, and Nutresa, another Colombian food company that runs many brands under one holding. For this guide we use a warm orange, a leaf green and a maize cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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