A young businessman, a German technician and a tin of sausages.

Zenú began in 1957. El Colombiano, the Medellín daily, reported in 2013 that the company was founded by the young businessman Eduardo Ospina Vásquez, with the support of his father, Pedro Nel Ospina, using equipment imported from the United States and the help of a German technician, Matías Brass. It started on 19 August that year with 50 employees as the Compañía de Productos Zenú, making canned meats: sausages, the spiced meat spread known as carne de diablo, and jamoneta, a canned ham-style meat.

The name comes from the Zenú, the Indigenous people of the Sinú and San Jorge river valleys in the Caribbean departments of Córdoba and Sucre, the newspaper said. Spanish Wikipedia describes the Zenú, also called the Sinú, as a people whose ancestors were noted goldsmiths and potters and who built a large system of drainage canals across the floodplains of the region, and it records a population of about 307,000 in 2018.

In its first year the plant turned out 12,000 cans a day, El Colombiano said, and two years later Zenú introduced what the paper called a “revolution”: a small key attached to each tin so it could be opened. The founders did not keep the business for long. In 1962 they sold it to the Medellín biscuit maker Noel, the newspaper reported, and Spanish Wikipedia gives the same year for Noel’s purchase of Productos Zenú.

From tins to cold cuts.

Under Noel, Zenú grew quickly. Jaime Calle, who worked at the company from 1965 to 1992, told El Colombiano that its sales target for 1965 was doubled. After it obtained a health licence to sell its products across Colombia and abroad, the paper said, the company began automating its processes in 1974 and became the first Colombian company to use vacuum packing. By 1983 it was producing 50 tonnes a day and had shifted its focus from the traditional canned goods towards cold cuts, while adding a line of canned vegetables.

Growth also came by acquisition. El Colombiano lists the purchases of Frigorífico Suizo in Bogotá, Frigorífico Continental in Barranquilla, Rica Rondo in Cali and Industrias Hermo in Venezuela; Spanish Wikipedia dates the Hermo investment to 1995 and says the group separated Noel and Zenú into distinct companies in 1999. Calle told the paper that he had been handed one company and left ten meat companies within the group. In 2008 the meat business moved into Panama with the purchase of Ernesto Berard, which was merged in 2011 with the earlier-acquired Blue Ribbon Products to form Alicapsa, Spanish Wikipedia says.

The tin with its key stayed in people’s memories. Writing in El Colombiano in February 2024, the journalist Ferney Arias Jiménez recalled the Zenú sausage tins of the 1970s as hermetically sealed metal cans that came with a key to open them, and said that as a child he had believed each key was different and that a lost one meant a tin could never be opened. In the same column he listed Zenú sausages alongside Frunas fruit chews, Jet chocolate bars and Noel’s saltine crackers as products of his childhood that, he wrote, took him years to realise all came from the same Medellín group.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Colombia or Chile: Alpina, Zenú, Corona, Águila, Soprole, Colún and Watt’s. Colombian and Chilean food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The meat business of Grupo Nutresa.

In 2013 El Colombiano described Industria de Alimentos Zenú as the umbrella for the group’s meat businesses and as the largest meat-food company in the country, a business that had grown out of the original production of canned sausages. Zenú today belongs to the meat business of Grupo Nutresa, the Medellín food group formerly called Grupo Nacional de Chocolates. Its operating company in Colombia is Industria de Alimentos Zenú S.A.S., Nutresa says. The group describes its meat business as making processed cold cuts, matured meats, sausages, canned vegetables, ready meals, snacks, mushrooms, fresh meat, fish and plant-based products, and in 2023 it listed eight production plants in Colombia for the business, one in Panama and one in another country. It says the business leads its market in Colombia and Panama.

Control of the group changed in February 2024. El Colombiano reported on 11 February that Nutresa had passed that week to new investors including the Gilinski family and the Emirati investment fund IHC Capital Holding; Spanish Wikipedia, citing El Colombiano in January 2025, names Jaime Gilinski as the group’s president. The Indigenous Zenú people, after whom the company was named in 1957, remain a living community in Córdoba and Sucre, separate from the company that carries their name.

For a design guide, Zenú shows how a key on a tin and the name of an Indigenous people carried a Colombian meat brand from canned sausages to cold cuts. Compare Noel, the Medellín biscuit maker that bought Zenú in 1962, and Campofrío, the Burgos charcuterie maker. For this guide we use a tin red, a Sinú gold and a can silver with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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