Celebrating 300 Years’ Combined Brand Experience

Welcome to the 300 years’ experience

The heritage brands have made CFS a leader in performance-enhancing equipment and materials for food preparation, processing, marination, slicing and packaging. These companies include Krämer+Grebe, Koppens, Tiromat, Aquarius, Wolfking, Scanio, Belam and Dixie Union, and collectively they celebrate 300 years’ experience.

The thirties and forties
Fritz Krämer took over a range of meat processing machines in 1936, and laid the foundations for the future. Ludwig Grebe joined him, and in 1942 they moved to Wallau (Germany) where CFS still manufactures bowl cutters and thermoformers – machines that owe their innovative design to the pioneering work carried out by Krämer+Grebe. In 1949, William Jensen founded Wolfking in Slagelse in Denmark, and the company has been a pioneer in preparation equipment ever since. Milestones include being the first to deliver a conventional processing line for production in China, and the first fully computer controlled line.

The fifties, sixties and seventies
1953 was a productive year for CFS. Coen Aquarius founded his lollipop equipment factory in Weert in the Netherlands, and Herbert Jacobowitz and Otto Koetzsch started a company in Kempten Germany that was later to become Dixie Union. Aquarius still leads in machines for confectionery production, and is responsible for the vertical form-fill-seal packaging expertise in the CFS SmartPackers. Aquarius also acquired Elba in 1992, a leading manufacturer of machines for sugar cube production. Dixie Union’s early history starts with the first semi-automatic thermoformers in the fifties, slicers in the sixties, and packaging materials in the seventies.

The Koppens Machine factory in Bakel was founded by Jan, Wim and Nelly Koppens in 1961in the Netherlands. The burger formers, mixing drums, fryers and coating solutions have evolved in today’s CFS processing equipment range. Scanio started in Denmark in 1962, and became widely known for their lifting and transport equipment, tumblers and brine management solutions. The expertise lives on in the CFS ScanBrine and CFS ScanMidi. Wolfking acquired Scanio in 1997. Another marination expert acquired by Wolfking was Belam, who started in 1972 in the Netherlands. Their brine injection expertise is the basis for today’s CFS range. The sixties were important for Krämer+Grebe, as the Tiromat thermoformers were introduced. Today the Tiromat name lives on in CFS thermoformers for technical packaging. The CFS PowerPak range stems from this heritage.

The eighties and beyond
In 1988, Swedish company Alfa Laval acquired Koppens, and in 1989 Krämer+Grebe joined the group. In 1991 Tetra Pak acquired the entire Alfa Laval group and the food processing division became known as Tetra Laval Convenience Foods. In 1997 the meat processing and packaging companies in this group became Convenience Food Systems. More acquisitions followed, including Aquarius (1999), Dixie Union (2000) and Wolfking (2001). The most recent corporate development is the name change to CFS in 2004.

Building a reputation: performance is the key
Understandably the CFS ‘brand’ is not yet as established in the minds of some customers as the great names mentioned above. Building a brand takes products and people that live up to the brand values. For CFS, this is ‘Lifecycle Performance’, and the key word is performance. From conception and development to design and operation – improving the customer’s performance is our priority.

How do you measure performance?
‘Performance’ means different things in different applications or situations. Flexibility – like the ability to change cost effectively from one application to another – is a critical performance parameter for companies producing many different products is smaller quantities. But a large-scale operation continuously producing one product would value reliability and uninterrupted uptime more.

Best products
This is why we design and build our products to deliver the best possible performance in the way you use them. Take the CFS CookStar, and it is about Yield Performance. Or the CFS MegaSlicer, which leads in On-weight Performance. The CFS CutMaster delivers Control Performance, while the CFS PowerPakNT is all about Package Performance – in all its dimensions.