DLAB Branding Atelier — Pillar 8: The Invisible Balance.
That same year he denied, in the only great interview he gave in his life, that BonÀrea was a "family business". Five years later, his generational change has been officially explained as the protection of a legacy.
It was 1959. Jaume Alsina was 25 years old, a recently graduated veterinarian and he encountered a very specific problem: the mechanization of the countryside had left the animals he had studied to care for out of work. Together with a small group of residents of Guissona, a town in the region of La Segarra, he set up a small cooperative to manufacture feed. The objective was not to get rich. It was to prevent the region from emptying.
Today, 66 years later, that cooperative is BonÀrea: a group that in 2025 had a turnover of 2,826 million euros, exceeded 100 million euros in net profit for the first time in its history, employs more than 6,600 people and operates nearly 630 of its own stores. Not a single bank on the balance sheet: all its expansion has been financed with its own resources since, in the seventies, an entity returned a check for a minimum difference in balance. One in three stores is in a small town or a rural area — a deliberate decision, not a coincidence, to keep economic activity alive where other operators do not reach.
The model that has made this possible is total vertical integration: from feed to farm, from farm to slaughterhouse, from slaughterhouse to one's own store, without intermediaries at any point in the chain. It was not born from a positioning strategy. It was born from a very specific rebellion: "We rebelled that supermarkets paid us in 60 or 90 days," Alsina explained years later. That decision of necessity ended up becoming the competitive advantage that no other meat group in the country has managed to replicate.
In 2021, in that same interview, Jaume Alsina made a statement that surprised those who read it carefully: "BonÀrea is not a family business." And he was right, at least on paper. When the cooperative became a public limited company, 60% of the shares were distributed linearly among thousands of farmer members. There is no majority shareholder named Alsina. There is not, strictly speaking, an owning family.
And yet, in May 2026, when Jaume Alsina – at the age of 92 and leading the group for more than sixty years – left the presidency, the company explained the handover with a very specific word. The official statement spoke of "preserving the business and human legacy" of its founder and of "reinforcing BonÀrea's unique model". His son Ramon Alsina, CEO for years, also assumed the chairmanship. The founder became honorary president.
This is what interests us. BonÀrea did, for decades, everything possible not to depend on a single owner family: it distributed the shareholding among thousands of partners, built a government designed to survive any specific person. And even so, at the moment of greatest fragility of any organization – the change of who is in charge – the word chosen to explain itself to the world was not "strategy" or "corporate governance". It was legacy.
This confirms something that we constantly see in the companies we work with, whether or not they have family shareholders in the strict sense: when an organization has built something real – a way of doing things, a reason for being, a concrete relationship with its territory – the generational change is no longer just a change of name in the organizational chart. It becomes the moment when you have to decide, out loud, what exactly you can't miss.
BonÀrea said it with a statement and a word chosen on purpose. Many family businesses that we know – with a much more concentrated shareholding than BonÀrea's – have never managed to do so. They change generations in silence, trusting that the legacy will be passed on by itself, by inertia. And inertia, unlike legacy, is never explained. It is simply diluted.
If tomorrow you had to announce, in a statement, the generational change of your company,
What word would you choose to explain what cannot be lost?
