Symaga Brand Guidelines: The 1985 Villarta de San Juan Silo Maker From La Mancha

Feed silos made by hand in 1985.

Symaga started in 1985 in Villarta de San Juan, a farming town in La Mancha in the province of Ciudad Real. Its founder, Alfonso Garrido Muñoz, had worked as a salesman of animal feed and livestock before he began making his own feed silos by hand in a 200-square-metre warehouse in the town, Milling Middle East & Africa reported in March 2025. The company’s own history gives the same picture: Garrido wanted to build silos that would cut losses of grain and feed for farmers and livestock keepers.

The company’s timeline traces a steady climb from that workshop. It says it bought its first roll-forming machine in 1989, the start of a modernisation that would take about two decades; had 20 employees and its first punching machine by 1991; and worked on its first export project, for France, in 1992, followed by Portugal and Morocco. By 1995 it was exporting to South America and across Europe, it says.

Diversification followed in the 2000s. Symaga says it began making water tanks and vineyard posts in 2002, added robots to standardise quality in 2004, when its direct workforce reached 50, invested more in research and development and livestock installations from 2005, and automated welding and folding in 2006. It opened an office in Madrid in 2007, marked its 25th anniversary in 2010 with investment in full factory automation, and built new offices in Villarta de San Juan in 2012 for a staff that had passed 120, according to the same history.

The company has stayed in the town where it began. Its legal name is Symaga, S.A., and it has also traded as Symaga Group, the name used by the Spanish trade publisher Interempresas in 2018.

An automated steel works.

Symaga makes galvanised steel silos, and its range runs from farm feed bins to port terminals. The company lists flat-bottom silos, hopper silos, loading silos, mass-discharge silos and indoor silos; farm silos with spiral and chain feed distribution systems; water tanks; and accessories, along with assembly and assembly supervision. In 2024, it says, the tanks and the farm feed distribution systems were brought together under the Symaga brand.

The factory is a large part of how the company presents itself. Symaga describes it as fully automated and equipped for “Industry 4.0,” with 30 robots, and says it has held the CE manufacturing certificate since 2013 and met the ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards from 2018. It says it installed a solar photovoltaic plant in 2020 and expanded it in 2022 to cover about 70 per cent of the factory’s electricity use. Those are the company’s own statements.

In September 2024 Symaga announced that it would move to a higher-strength steel, S450GD, for the stiffeners and body sheets of its silos, raising the yield strength of those parts from 350 to 450 newtons per square millimetre and reducing the weight of the finished silo, Milling Middle East & Africa reported.

The projects show where most of the work goes. Interempresas reported in January 2018 that Symaga’s 2017 order book had included storage plants of 240,000 tonnes for the Ukrainian grain company Nibulon, a new port terminal in Odessa, six paddy rice storage plants in Nigeria with a combined capacity of more than 390,000 tonnes, and three installations in Saudi Arabia, among them work at King Abdullah Port and a new feed mill at the port of Yanbu. The company’s own project list today also names Dangote in Nigeria and the government of Egypt.

The category.

Grain storage and handling is a trade whose products are buildings as much as machines. Its makers sell corrugated steel bins that stand in rows on prairie farms, hopper tanks for wet grain and load-out, tall bucket elevators and the towers and catwalks that link them, and dryers that run through the weeks of harvest. Further along the chain sit seed-cleaning plants, conveyors for fertiliser and pulse crops, and, in Asia, rice mills.

That shapes how the makers present themselves. Catalogue covers and websites lean on photographs of finished sites rather than single products: a cluster of galvanised bins against a wide sky, an elevator leg rising above a farmyard, a dryer tower lit up at dusk. Galvanised steel is the shared material, so a maker’s colour usually lives in its logo, its decals and its painted parts rather than in the structures themselves.

The business is also one of brands inside groups. Many of the names a farmer sees on an auger or a bin began as family workshops and were later bought by larger companies, which often keep the old name next to a group prefix. Ownership can change several times, through private-equity funds, listed companies and machinery groups, while the product names carry on.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — when and where it began, who owns it now, where it says its products are made and which ranges it is known for — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An exporter’s mark, refreshed for 40 years.

Exports are the core of the business. In December 2017 the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha gave Symaga Group its Mérito Empresarial award in the exporting company category, Interempresas reported in January 2018. The award was received by Marta Garrido, then Symaga’s operations director, and the report said exports made up about 90 per cent of the business, with installations in more than 140 countries and more than 20 years in international markets.

The identity has been renewed more than once. The company’s history lists “new brands and logo” in 2016 and a new management structure in 2018. For its 40th anniversary in 2025, Symaga introduced a special logo and the slogan “40 Years Preserving the World’s Harvest,” to be used across all of its communications, products and events during the anniversary year, Milling Middle East & Africa reported in March 2025. The same report said the company had by then supplied silo installations in about 150 countries and completed some 15,000 projects; Symaga’s own website now gives more than 18,000 projects, 154 countries and more than 150 staff.

The anniversary was marked with a ceremony at the headquarters in Villarta de San Juan, Miller Magazine reported in June 2025. Guests toured the production plant, Patricia Franco, Castilla-La Mancha’s minister for economy, business and employment, spoke about the company’s part in the region’s industry, and members of the Garrido family paid tribute to the founder and unveiled a bust in his honour. Ana, Marta and Alfonso Garrido Parejo spoke on behalf of the family, the magazine reported.

The company frames its work in broad terms: it says it works to help feed the world through efficient storage, and its anniversary slogan made the harvest itself the subject rather than the steel.

For a design guide, Symaga shows how a rural workshop can build a global exporter’s identity while keeping its home town at the centre of the story. Compare Silos Córdoba, another Spanish silo maker, and Sukup, another grain storage maker. For this guide we use galvanised silver, a deep navy and a wheat gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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