Zuellig Pharma Brand Guidelines: A Swiss Trader in Manila, 1922, and Asia’s Cold Chain

A Swiss trader in the Philippines.

Zuellig Pharma is a healthcare distribution and services company with its regional head office in Singapore. It traces its history to Frederik E. Zuellig, a Swiss businessman who, the company says, sailed to Manila in 1901 to make a career in international trade. Singapore’s Economic Development Board, in an August 2025 profile, describes the company as founded more than a century ago by “Swiss businessman Dr Frederik E. Zuellig.”

The year the company gives as its start is 1922. By then, it says, Zuellig had taken full ownership of the trading house Lutz & Zuellig, which dealt in consumer health goods from Switzerland and Tansan mineral water from Japan, and he incorporated it as F. E. Zuellig, Inc., with offices in Manila, Cebu, Ilo Ilo, Zurich and New York. The company’s own summary calls it a corporation “established in the Philippines in 1922.”

Medicines came to the centre of the business in 1938, when F. E. Zuellig, Inc. set up a Drug Department to import and market pharmaceuticals and other healthcare products, the company says. In 1939 the group set up its first subsidiary office in Singapore, the Economic Development Board reported.

The Second World War interrupted that growth. The Economic Development Board’s profile says international trade came to a standstill and that the company’s offices and warehouses were destroyed in the Battle of Manila in 1945. After the war, according to both the company and the board, Frederik Zuellig’s sons Stephen and Gilbert Zuellig rebuilt the business, which then grew quickly with the arrival of antibiotics and other new medicines.

From importer to regional distributor.

Over the next four decades the company spread across Asia. It says it entered markets including Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan, through manufacturing plants and acquisitions. In 1972, it says, it adopted a new model in which it offered clients a range of marketing, distribution and logistics services, the basis of its large-scale distribution work for international drug makers.

The name Zuellig Pharma arrived in the 1990s, when the company says it rebranded across the region and set up a regional headquarters in Hong Kong. In that decade it also expanded into Korea and Vietnam and bought Metro Drug Corporation in the Philippines. In 1995, the company says, it and Interphil Laboratories opened a manufacturing plant and distribution centre at Canlubang, in Laguna province.

In 2007 Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings took a minority stake, according to the company. In 2009 it opened a warehouse and distribution centre at Changi in Singapore, and in 2015 it moved its regional head office from Hong Kong to Singapore, the Economic Development Board reported in 2025. The company names John Graham as its chief executive.

The board’s 2025 profile put Zuellig Pharma in 17 markets, working with more than 200,000 medical facilities and employing more than 12,000 people; a company announcement in November 2026 gave 18 markets. The profile describes the company as traditionally known as a pharmaceutical and cold-chain distributor that has moved into bringing products from American and European firms to Asian markets. In 2020 it launched eZTracker, a blockchain-based track-and-trace system for medicines, and in 2023 it helped GSK set up its first vaccine distribution hub in the Asia-Pacific region, serving 13 markets, the board reported.

Recognition has come from the Singapore government. At the 2022 National Awards (COVID-19), Zuellig Pharma Singapore received the President’s Certificate of Commendation, the Economic Development Board reported, and three members of its team received the Public Service Medal. The company also says it has earned consecutive EcoVadis Platinum ratings for its environmental, social and governance practices.

Design and documentation.

Pharmaceutical wholesalers sit between the companies that make medicines and the pharmacies, hospitals and clinics that hand them out, so their public image is mostly an image of movement. The pictures these companies tend to show are long automated warehouse aisles, conveyor lines carrying plastic totes, and high racks of shelving, with staff in high-visibility vests picking orders between them. The aim of that imagery is to show scale and order rather than any single product.

The second recurring scene is the road. Fleets of liveried vans and temperature-controlled trucks carry the company name through towns and onto motorways and are often the most visible sign of a wholesaler on the street. Close-ups of insulated cold-chain boxes, data loggers and handheld barcode scanners carry the same message at a smaller size: goods are tracked from shelf to doorstep.

The third scene is the pharmacy counter. Because many wholesalers also run pharmacy networks, franchise banners or buying groups, their brochures often show a pharmacist behind a counter talking with a customer, which gives a logistics business a human face. These banners usually carry their own names and colours, separate from the parent company, so one wholesaler can stand behind several identities on the high street.

Beyond that, the visual record is corporate: trade-fair stands, investor presentations and annual reports with supply-chain diagrams of arrows linking factories, distribution centres and pharmacies. For a design study, the useful question is how one identity can work on a lorry side, a carton label, a pharmacy sign and a screen at the same time.

Depots, cold rooms and clinical supply.

Much of Zuellig Pharma’s newer work sits behind the scenes, in clinical trial supply. On 4 November 2026 the company announced, in a release distributed by PR Newswire, that it had acquired a clinical supply facility in Hangzhou, China, holding a drug distribution licence, which it said would let it source comparator drugs and other medicines locally for clinical trials. The release said the site links to its existing Beijing depot and to a network of more than 45 clinical depots, with cold rooms held at several controlled temperature ranges.

In the same release the company described its clinical trial support business as a logistics and sourcing partner to 29 of the world’s top 50 pharmaceutical companies and 18 of the top 50 contract research organisations, and said it works with more than 450 clients; those are the company’s own figures. It describes its work as distribution, commercialisation, clinical trial support and patient care, and gives its purpose as making healthcare more accessible in Asia.

The company’s look is not documented in the sources used here: its logo, colours and typeface are not described, so the palette below is our own. What the sources do describe is a visual world of warehouses, depots and cold rooms, from the Changi distribution centre to the Hangzhou facility, and a 2022 “5G warehouse” trial with Singtel and Accenture that the Economic Development Board reported.

For a design guide, Zuellig Pharma shows how a century-old family trading name can become the brand of a regional healthcare network. Compare DKSH, the Zurich-based distributor that also works across Asia, and PHOENIX group, a European wholesaler. For this guide we use teal, a pale mist and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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