Oriol Domènech: “We’ve Built Innovation into the Company’s Everyday Life”

With more than 15 years of experience, MaxiSalt has become an international reference in salt production and distribution, betting on innovation, sustainability, and applied knowledge as its growth engines. Having recently joined Clúster MAV, the company also drives the Salt Innovation Hub, a space designed to connect research, industry, and new applications linked to salt and advanced materials.

We spoke with Oriol Domènech, CEO of MaxiSalt, about the company’s journey, the challenges facing the sector, and the opportunities that innovation opens up in this field.

From a Family Business to a Global Salt Specialist

MaxiSalt was born in 2009 out of two main factors: a reorganization of the family business, which led to specializing in a single product — salt — with a clearly international orientation; and the economic crisis of those years, which forced the company to rethink itself and spot new opportunities within the sector. Today, MaxiSalt’s value proposition centers on being experts in salt and global distribution, capable of guaranteeing supply to customers from multiple points around the world and through different logistics models.

Present in Every Sector Where Salt Matters

MaxiSalt is present across every sector that uses salt as a raw material or as part of its process: chemical manufacturing (chlorine and caustic soda production), water treatment, road de-icing, human and animal food, textiles, aluminum, oil, and swimming pools. The company is especially strong in bulk wholesale distribution, using ships that can carry between 5,000 and 60,000 tons across origin and destination points worldwide.

One of the company’s biggest evolutionary leaps was opening international subsidiaries and its own logistics centers — expanding from its headquarters in Granollers into South America, Hong Kong, and France, and becoming recognized as a global supplier. Vertically integrating production and logistics, with its own terminals for loading ships, has also been key to becoming more agile and competitive.

Salt Innovation Hub: A Knowledge Center Open to the Sector

One of the company’s major recent turning points has been the creation of the Salt Innovation Hub, a knowledge center built around a database of more than 500 types of salt from around the world. It was born from the need to put years of accumulated technical knowledge to work — opening it up both to MaxiSalt’s own research and to research centers and companies that want to use salt as a raw material.

By sharing this knowledge with the sector, MaxiSalt aims to give continuity to different lines of research and application, while reinforcing its brand as an expert in the salt industry and driving new future projects. It’s a bet on pushing a traditionally automated and conservative sector one step further, opening the door to new applications and new products based on salt.

Innovation as a Mindset, Not a Department

Creating the Salt Innovation Hub has tilted the whole organization toward innovation. Rather than isolating it in a single department, MaxiSalt has rethought its entire organization so that an innovative mindset is embedded in everyone’s day-to-day work. New innovation committees, new internal processes, and a culture focused on constantly spotting opportunities for improvement have followed — a transformation driven from leadership, but involving every team.

Salt’s Potential for Advanced Materials

Salt is an everyday product across the world, but its applications for advanced materials are still largely untapped. Its abundance and competitive price mean it isn’t a niche material — it can open the door to a huge range of applications. MaxiSalt is already researching uses linked to sodium batteries, new electrolytes for the electrochemical industry, micro power generation, and photosensitive processes to generate hydrogen. A key part of the approach is prioritizing salts that, if they prove successful in research, can move directly into the market in a competitive way — helping to accelerate R&D processes significantly.

Sustainability at the Core

Sustainability is fully integrated into MaxiSalt’s activity. The company is particularly boosting the use of sea salt, obtained through the natural evaporation of seawater by sun and wind — a sustainable and virtually inexhaustible resource. It also invests in salt marsh ecosystems in North Africa that help generate protected natural environments and bird refuges. On the logistics side, MaxiSalt works with more efficient ships and cargo consolidation strategies to reduce the environmental impact of maritime transport.

Reshaping the Organization Around AI

MaxiSalt is working intensively on artificial intelligence, seeing it as a major opportunity, and is shifting the whole organization to become an AI-ready company. The first step was thinking strategically about how the sector — and MaxiSalt itself — will look once AI is fully implemented. The company is now putting human and technical resources behind every team and has created a dedicated team focused on AI implementation, exploring how to bring it into day-to-day processes. Integrating artificial intelligence into the way the company works is expected to help MaxiSalt become a more efficient, sustainable, and future-ready industry leader.

Why Join Clúster MAV

MaxiSalt had been following Clúster MAV’s activity for some time, recognizing that salt could play a relevant role within the advanced materials ecosystem. The creation of the Salt Innovation Hub provided the ideal context to take the step and share this knowledge with other companies and research centers — opening the door to collaboration with organizations developing new applications with advanced materials.

Looking Ahead

MaxiSalt sees itself operating in a moment of major transformation. Geopolitical shifts are directly affecting logistics and material availability, but they’re also opening new opportunities. In this landscape, technology, sustainability, and especially artificial intelligence will be key to continuing to evolve and adapt to the needs of the global market.

Read the full interview, available in Catalan, Spanish, English, and French:
https://clustermav.com/news/oriol-domenech-maxisalt-hem-integrat-la-innovacio-en-el-dia-a-dia-de-lempresa/

Watch the video interview on YouTube — select Catalan, Spanish, English, or French from the video’s language settings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-kuRuano-Q