Soriana Brand Guidelines: A 1968 Torreón Hypermarket, City Club and Comercial Mexicana

A Torreón fabric shop that turned into a supermarket.

Soriana’s roots go back further than its supermarkets. English Wikipedia says the business began in 1905, when Pascual Borque, a native of Soria in Spain, opened a fabric and perfumery shop called La Soriana in Torreón, Coahuila. The shop added wholesale trade in 1920, and in 1930 the brothers Francisco and Armando Martín Borque took over its management and carried it into Coahuila, Durango, Chihuahua and Sonora. Over the following years it moved its focus from wholesale to retail.

The supermarket company dates from 1968. That year, the encyclopaedia says, La Soriana gave up textiles and perfumery and opened its first hypermarket, then described as a commercial centre, in downtown Torreón; it treats this as the formal start of Organización Soriana, and the Martín Borque brothers are credited as the founders. Growth followed across the north: the first Monterrey store, Soriana Vallarta, opened in 1974, the same year as branches in Durango and Chihuahua, and stores in Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa came in the 1980s. Soriana shares began trading on the Mexican Stock Exchange on 30 September 1987, under the ticker SORIANA.

For a few years there were two chains. Toward the end of the 1980s the brothers divided the business: Francisco kept the Soriana stores under a company called Tiendas de Descuento del Nazas, while Armando founded the Hipermart chain in Monterrey, whose first stores opened in 1989. In 1994 the brothers merged the two again, forming Centros Comerciales Soriana, later Tiendas Soriana. That year the chain also entered Jalisco and Guanajuato, and in December 2000 its hundredth store opened in Tepic, Nayarit. In 2005, when Carrefour left Mexico, Soriana bought a handful of its stores in Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora. In 2006 the company moved its headquarters from Torreón to Monterrey, Nuevo León.

New formats, Gigante and Comercial Mexicana.

Soriana grew by adding formats under its own name. English Wikipedia dates the City Club price club to 17 July 2002 in Torreón, aimed at large households and businesses buying in bulk; the same year brought a loyalty card, renamed Tarjeta Recompensas in 2015. Mercado Soriana, a mid-sized supermarket for towns of 50,000 to 150,000 people, opened in July 2003 in Salamanca, Guanajuato. The franchised Súper City convenience stores arrived in 2005, and Soriana Express, with sales floors of 800 to 1,500 square metres for small towns and dense neighbourhoods, followed in 2010.

The first large purchase came in December 2007, when Soriana bought 199 Supermercados Gigante stores from Grupo Gigante, the encyclopaedia says. On 18 April 2008 the Gigante formats were dropped and the stores took Soriana names, including a new Soriana Súper format for smaller sites; with that conversion the chain reached all 32 Mexican states. Seven Gigante stores in the United States that came with the deal were sold to Chedraui in May 2008.

The second was Comercial Mexicana. In January 2015 Comercial Mexicana agreed to sell most of its self-service stores to Soriana, keeping its smaller City Market, Sumesa and Fresko formats in a separate company, El Financiero reported on 9 October 2015. In the same report Mexico’s competition commission, Cofece, said it had studied 160 local markets and found that the deal would significantly reduce competition in 27 of them; Soriana could either decline the stores in those markets or buy them and sell them within a set period, with Cofece approving any buyer. In December 2015 Soriana launched its final share offer, set slightly lower than first announced because some stores were excluded, El Universal reported.

English Wikipedia says 143 stores, under the Comercial Mexicana, MEGA, Bodega Comercial Mexicana and Alprecio formats, passed to Soriana on 4 January 2016, together with the Julio Regalado promotion that Comercial Mexicana had run since 1980. Soriana relaunched Julio Regalado in the acquired stores on 3 June 2016, and from March 2017 it began converting them to its own formats, starting with 14 branches in Baja California that became Soriana Híper.

How Mexican grocery and pharmacy chains present themselves.

Mexican supermarket, pharmacy, discount and footwear chains tend to show their identity less through one logo than through a family of names. A grocer may run a hypermarket, a supermarket, a warehouse store and a neighbourhood shop side by side, and the format names do the sorting: a prefix or suffix such as Híper, Súper, Mercado or Express, or a diminutive for the smallest stores, tells shoppers what size of shop to expect before they walk in.

Promotions and own programmes carry weight too. Seasonal campaigns with their own names, loyalty cards and printed or online flyers appear on the companies’ own pages as part of how the stores present themselves, and some promotion names have outlived the chains that created them, moving with the stores when they changed hands. Mascots, catalogues and house ranges play a similar role for pharmacy and footwear sellers, and a guide can describe them only as the companies publish them.

Ownership is usually stated plainly. Several of these groups began as family shops in a single city and still describe their founders, holding companies and stock-exchange listings on corporate pages; takeovers between rivals recur, and a store can carry several names over its life. Regulators have a part in that story: competition reviews can decide which stores a buyer may keep.

For a designer, the useful lesson is the system rather than any single mark: how a palette, a sans and a set of format names can scale from a large hypermarket to a corner store without losing the parent name. In this guide the palette and type are an unofficial interpretation; no logo, fascia or product is reproduced.

Five format names and 820 stores at the end of 2025.

Soriana’s format names carry much of its identity. At the end of 2025 the company had 820 stores and clubs in Mexico, Xataka México reported in August 2026, citing the company’s 2025 annual report: 372 Soriana Híper, 165 Soriana Mercado, 136 Soriana Súper, 106 Soriana Express and 41 City Club, spread across 287 municipalities in all 32 states. In the first quarter of 2026 the company closed eight stores, El CEO reported in June 2026.

The same name also stretches upmarket. In 2011, English Wikipedia says, Soriana opened Soriana Súper VIP, a remodelled supermarket in San Pedro Garza García with gourmet foods and imported wines, and on 10 June 2016 it opened the first Soriana Híper Plus, a hypermarket with cheese, wine, bread and pastry departments, in the Miyana centre in Polanco, Mexico City. A second Híper Plus followed in San Pedro in December 2016. At the other end of the range, Soriana Express and Mercado Soriana take the name into small towns. The encyclopaedia adds that at the end of 2014 Soriana introduced a new corporate image for the company and its store formats, first applied at the Soriana Súper San Agustín store in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco.

Soriana remains a Mexican public company listed in Mexico, and English Wikipedia names Ricardo Martín Bringas, a son of co-founder Francisco Martín Borque, as the executive who took over its leadership.

For a design guide, Soriana shows how one name can stretch across a price club, a hypermarket and a small-town supermarket through format tags rather than separate brands. Compare Chedraui, another Mexican chain that grew by buying rivals’ stores, and Walmart, whose Mexican arm runs the Bodega Aurrera banner. For this guide we use a brick red, a warm sun yellow and a cocoa ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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