Rheon Brand Guidelines: The Utsunomiya Encrusting Maker Named After Rheology

A confectioner, a theory and a machine.

Rheon Automatic Machinery takes its name from rheology, the study of how materials flow and deform. The company, known in Japanese as レオン自動機, says the word is the source of its name, and that the idea was central to the work of its founder, Torahiko Hayashi.

Hayashi came to machinery from the shop counter. The American Society of Baking, which inducted him into its Baking Hall of Fame in 2013, says he opened a Japanese confectionery store at the age of 26. Its citation says he developed his encrusting machine after ten years of study, using viscosity and elasticity to shape food.

The dates depend on the source. Rheon and the American Society of Baking both say the first automatic encrusting machine was developed in 1961. The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers says Hayashi mechanised the encrusting work of Japanese confectionery, until then done by hand by craftsmen, in 1963, “for the first time in the world.” The society’s date matches the first machine on sale: the N101, launched in 1963.

The company itself was founded on 15 March 1963 in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture. Rheon says the mass media called the N101 a “dream machine,” and that orders reached 270 units within three months when only ten a month could be built. Its history page adds that with no cranes available, the first machines were hung from pine trees to be loaded on to trucks.

Overseas growth came quickly. Rheon says that in May 1968, on a visit to the United States for an exhibition, Hayashi signed a long-term export contract with American Bakers Cooperative, after the Model 200 had widened the machine’s use from confectionery to bread. A liaison office in Germany followed in 1969 and a laboratory in Paramus, New Jersey, in 1970. In 1974 the company set up Rheon U.S.A. in New Jersey and Rheon Automatic Machinery GmbH in Düsseldorf, which it says doubled as test plants where local food companies could try the machines.

Encrusting first, then dough.

An encrusting machine wraps one food inside another. The Japanese term Rheon uses, 包あん機, refers to wrapping an, the sweet bean paste of Japanese confectionery. Popular Science explained the method in June 2012: an outer casing and an internal nozzle extrude two products at once, then close together. The same magazine listed the results as balls, logs, rolls, twists, buns, croissants and pizzas, and named dumplings, empanadas and fried risotto balls among the foods made this way.

The defining early model was the 105, released in February 1966. The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers lists it as Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 71, saying it came after many improvements to operability and durability and contributed to the modernisation of the confectionery industry. Rheon dates the recognition to 2015 and says 1,838 units were sold over eight years, and recalls a television commercial featuring the actor E. H. Erick. The society says the machine is on exhibition, by reservation, at the company’s Rheology Memorial Museum.

The best-known series has two names. The computerised CN100 arrived in 1987, and the founder nicknamed it for its appearance. In English that nickname is given as CORNUCOPIA; on Rheon’s Japanese site it is 火星人, “Martian.” The company says this is the series it has shipped in the largest numbers. The CN500 followed in 2000 and the CN700 in 2020.

The second line of work is dough. Rheon says Hayashi developed the Stress-Free Stretcher in 1974, a device that spreads dough with very light pressure, and that it led to the MM automatic pastry line in 1975. The V4 Dough Feeder and the Stress Free V4 Bread Line followed in 1996, the VM System for weighing and dividing in 1999, and the HM Pastry Line in 2023. The American Society of Baking says Rheon showed a complete Stress Free system for artisan breads at the IBIE bakery show in Las Vegas in 1997, a year later than the launch date on the company’s history page.

Rheon also went into food production. It set up Orange Bakery in the United States in 1979 as a model plant, and says the business helped drive a US croissant boom in the 1980s. Popular Science reported in 2012 that customers ran from small bakeries to the largest food producers, and that Rheon equipment had reached 112 countries.

Steel, belts and trade fairs.

Makers of food processing machinery tend to show the work itself. Stainless lines are photographed under cool light, fillets move along white belts, sausage ropes curve out of a filler, slicers fan portions onto a conveyor, and fryers and seasoning drums turn snacks in close-up. The BBC opened a 2017 report on Marel in just that way, with cod on a conveyor and a machine cutting each fillet into portions.

Steel carries much of the imagery. Wash-down surfaces, welded seams and the curve of a hopper recur in close-up, and the machines are shown at close range.

Test kitchens and technology centres are the sector’s showrooms. JBT Marel lists Customer Technology Centers on several continents where customers can run their own product through the equipment, and Handtmann describes its Forum in Biberach as a technology and customer centre. Websites often follow the customer’s food rather than the machine: JBT Marel sorts its site by poultry, meat, seafood, prepared foods and beverages, and Handtmann’s regional sites by meat and sausage, baked goods, pet food and dairy.

The trade fairs set the calendar. IFFA in Frankfurt, SÜDPACK in Friedrichshafen, Anuga FoodTec in Cologne, Seafood Processing Global in Barcelona and PACK EXPO in the United States are regular venues for the sector, alongside bakery and ingredient shows: vegconomist reported that Handtmann took new bakery processes to iba in 2025, and JBT Marel’s news page reported on CibusTec in 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, who owns it, and where its machines are made, marking clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

An independent company by stated principle.

Rheon has stayed a company in its own right. Its shares were listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1987 and on the First Section in 1989, and it moved to the Prime Market in 2022. Its corporate philosophy makes independence an explicit aim: Rheon says it will remain an independent company that belongs to no business group. The same statement sets out two other aims, to develop and sell machines that do not yet exist using its own technology, and to treat the whole world as its market.

Its motto, 存在理由のある企業たらん, means roughly a company with a reason to exist; the statement adds that such a reason comes only from being useful to society.

Rheon says its Kamikawachi Plant in Utsunomiya, which began operating in 1988, is its main production site, and that it brings development, design, machining, assembly, electrical installation, inspection, trial operation and shipment together in one integrated system. The company dates its ISO 9001 certification to 2018. In 2020 it opened the Rheon Solution Center at its head office, describing it as a place where customers can test its latest encrusting machines and bread lines and get advice on factory design.

Rheon’s group is wider than machinery. Its site lists Rheon Alumi and a natural-yeast company, Hoshino, among its domestic locations, and it describes eight domestic sales and service offices, each with a laboratory where machines can be tested. Abroad, it runs sales and service operations across the United States, Europe and Asia. The American Society of Baking’s 2013 citation said Rheon had been named in 2,765 patents.

Its public story rests on a few constants: a name taken from a branch of science, a founder’s machine, and a 1966 model kept in a company museum. The English history page uses the capitalised CORNUCOPIA where the Japanese page says Martian.

For a design guide, Rheon shows how a company name can carry a whole technical idea, and how one machine can carry two quite different nicknames. Compare Heat and Control and Urschel, two other food machinery makers. For this guide we use azuki, pastry cream and machine grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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