Siegfried Brand Guidelines: A Zofingen Pharmacy of 1873 Turned Contract Manufacturer

Ether, chloral and phenol, made in volume for other pharmacists.

Siegfried began with a pharmacy in Zofingen, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. The company says Samuel Benoni Siegfried took over his grandfather’s pharmacy in 1870 and in 1873 founded, with his brother-in-law Johann Wilhelm Dürselen, a business called Siegfried & Dürselen to make chemical-pharmaceutical preparations and trade in drugs. German Wikipedia says the business started with 12 employees and was set up to supply pharmacies.

The idea, as the company tells it, was scale. Siegfried reasoned that other pharmacists needed the same basic substances he did, and set out to make ether, chloral and phenol in large volumes for them; by 1880 he had stepped away from the pharmacy to run the industrial business. The company also says it produced and packaged products for third parties from the very start, work it now presents as the root of its contract-manufacturing business.

The firm became a joint-stock company in 1904. German Wikipedia says that from 1903 it was led by Siegfried’s sons, Kurt as scientific head and Paul Albrecht as commercial head. In 1927, the company says, frustrated by import barriers, it set up its first American subsidiary, Ganes Chemical Works, in New Jersey with its distribution partner Gane & Ingram. For its centenary in 1973 the company was listed on the Swiss stock exchange, and it remains listed as Siegfried Holding, with its headquarters still in Zofingen.

For most of the twentieth century Siegfried was a broad business. The company says that until the early 1980s it developed and made fine chemicals, specialist drugs and generics, pest-control agents and natural products, and traded them through agents and licensees in more than 100 countries.

From its own products to contract work.

The change of direction came in stages. The company says that from 1983 it focused on developing and producing active ingredients and medicines for the research-based pharmaceutical industry, and that in 1991 it adopted a strategy built on contract manufacturing rather than researching and making its own drugs. In 2001 it split into two divisions, Siegfried for contract manufacturing and Sidroga for natural products; Sidroga and the biotechnology division were sold in 2007, the year a plant opened in Malta and an inhalation team was built up in Munich. Ganes became Siegfried (USA), and in 2005 Siegfried bought the Penick Corporation of New Jersey, a producer of active ingredients for pain medicines, the company says.

Acquisitions after 2010 built the present network. In 2012 Siegfried entered sterile filling by buying Alliance Medical Products in Irvine, California, and in 2013 it began building a plant in Nantong, China, which German Wikipedia says received its operating licence in May 2016. In 2014 it bought the contract-manufacturing arm of Hameln Pharma in Lower Saxony, which German Wikipedia describes as a developer and maker of sterile liquid dosage forms.

The largest step was the purchase of BASF’s custom-synthesis business and part of its active-ingredients business. CHEManager reported on 25 September 2015 that all closing conditions had been met, including Swissmedic clearance for the Evionnaz site in Switzerland, and that the sites at Evionnaz, Minden in Germany and Saint-Vulbas in France would transfer on 30 September with more than 800 employees; the active ingredients moving to Siegfried included ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and caffeine. German Wikipedia records that BASF announced completion on 1 October 2015.

German Wikipedia adds that Siegfried took over a tablet and capsule plant in Zofingen from Arena Pharmaceuticals as of 31 March 2018. The company then took over two Novartis plants in Spain, at Barberà del Vallès and El Masnou, a step its history page dates to 2020 in its text and to 2021 in its timeline.

Design and documentation.

Contract development and manufacturing organisations, or CDMOs, make medicines for other companies. A drug developer may hand them a cell line, a molecule or a finished formula, and the partner develops the process, makes the drug substance, fills it into vials, syringes or capsules and packs it for trials or for sale. Most of that work happens out of public view, under the customer’s name rather than the maker’s, so the manufacturer’s own brand speaks mainly to other businesses.

The imagery of the trade is fairly consistent. Websites and brochures tend to show tall stainless-steel bioreactors and rows of single-use bags in bright, white production suites; operators in full gowns, hoods and gloves working in cleanrooms; and filling lines carrying glass vials. Aerial photographs of large new plants, often shown under construction or on opening day, stand in for scale, and site maps of a global network do the same job for reach.

Much of the brand work happens at trade events. CPHI, the pharmaceutical trade fair, and the BIO International Convention in the United States are where these companies take stands, announce deals and, at times, unveil new identities: Pharma Manufacturing reported that Catalent introduced its new corporate brand at CPHI Frankfurt in 2025.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it began, who owns it now, which sites and services it describes, and what has been reported about it — and separates documented facts from what the companies say about themselves. The colours and typefaces used here are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

Drug substances, drug products and viral vectors.

Siegfried now divides its work into drug substances, meaning active ingredients and intermediates, including controlled substances, and drug products, the finished forms such as oral solids, sterile injectables, ophthalmics and inhalation products. In 2023, the company says, it took a majority stake in DINAMIQS, a Swiss viral-vector developer based near Zurich, and in 2024 it bought an early-phase development site in Grafton, Wisconsin, from Curia.

The newest step was announced on 27 January 2026, when Siegfried said it had signed binding agreements with an affiliate of SK Capital Partners to buy three drug-substance sites: Noramco in Wilmington, Delaware; Purisys in Athens, Georgia; and Extractas Bioscience in Westbury, Tasmania. On 24 April 2026 it said all closing conditions had been met and that closing would take place on 1 May 2026, and its history page now lists the three sites as acquired in 2026. The company describes a network of 16 sites in eight countries on four continents, with Zofingen and Evionnaz as the two sites where newly developed processes are launched.

Its website pairs that network with the line “expect more” and with site-by-site pages that give the year each plant was founded or joined the group.

For a design guide, Siegfried shows how a pharmacist’s surname can carry a company through a century and a half of change. Compare Lonza, another Swiss manufacturing partner, and Cambrex, which also makes active ingredients under contract. For this guide we use a deep navy, a warm stone and a muted copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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