Revent Brand Guidelines: The Swedish Oven Maker Named for Re-Ventilation

A labour problem in late-1950s Sweden.

Revent is a Swedish oven maker with its head office at Upplands Väsby, outside Stockholm. Its own history begins with a single product, the rack oven, which the company says it introduced in 1958 and which it calls the world’s first. A company profile on the trade site Just Food repeats that date and that claim.

Revent tells the origin as an answer to a cost problem. In the late 1950s, it says, labour costs in Sweden were rising and the baking trade was looking for savings. Dough and finished goods were moved by hand on and off trays, and the trays travelled between proofing chambers and deck ovens on trolleys, some of them made of wood. The company’s founders, it says, set out to cut that handling.

The answer was to stop moving the bread. Dough went onto trays, the trays went into a rack, and the whole rack stayed together through the process: rolled into the proofing unit, rolled into the oven, then parked in a corner of the bakery to cool.

The name came from what happened next. Early on, the company says, it learned that the job was mainly about controlling heat and air. At the start of the 1960s it came up with a fan that reversed the hot air every two minutes, so nobody had to open the doors and turn the rack by hand. Upward-flowing air streams followed, and Revent says they remain central to its designs. The company name, it explains, is built from that work: Re-ventilation, Re-vent.

America came quickly. By 1964, Revent says, the design had drawn attention abroad: two New Jersey baking entrepreneurs, Herbie Freedman and Adam Boren, saw the steel structures at a large bakery in northern Sweden and went to Stockholm to negotiate a contract to sell Revent equipment in the United States. A year later the lead designer, Leif Johansson, and the production manager, Magnus Tillander, flew to New Jersey and installed the first rack oven on American soil, which the company records as Revent oven number 106.

From the 700 Series to a round oven.

Revent’s catalogue is still organised around the rack. The 700 Series runs from the single-rack 725 and 726 through the double-rack 723 and 724 to the multi-rack 703. The 725, for instance, takes one single rack for 600×800 mm trays and comes in gas, oil and electric versions. Around those ovens the company sells proofers and retarders, deck ovens with natural clay hearth stones, vacuum coolers and Rotosole, which Revent describes as a system that gives a rack oven the qualities of a rotating deck oven.

Much of the engineering carries acronyms that recur across the range: TCC for Total Convection Control and HVS for High Volume Steam. The installation method has a history too. Revent says it invented a wedge assembly system in the 1970s and that, with the oven design and a pre-programmed control panel, an oven can be installed and started up in four hours, and later relocated.

The company’s newest oven family is the ONE Series, a rack oven with a round baking chamber. The Canadian trade magazine Bakers Journal reported on it in May 2017, in a piece by Brian Hartz. Ron Schumacher, Revent’s national sales manager, told the magazine the project began in 2008, when the company expected to do little more than improve the burners. Then it asked bakers what they wanted. Three requests came back, he said: make the oven smaller, make it easier to work with, and make it a showpiece, with some of the theatre of a deli’s rotisserie.

The result, the magazine reported, was a smaller baking chamber and a sliding pocket door that reduced the footprint by 45 per cent. Burner, heat exchanger and steam system were all redesigned, and Schumacher said nineteen new patents had been applied for. The all-glass doors, lighting and curved glass were deliberate. Bakers should be able to show the product while it bakes, he said, and the oven could stand closer to customers. At the NAFEM foodservice show in Orlando in February 2017, the magazine reported, Revent’s Brad Winnaman baked baguettes and rolls in the ovens in front of visitors.

At that date the series had two models, the ONE26 single-rack oven and the ONE39 mini-rack oven, and the company’s site still lists those two. Revent calls the ONE Series its latest innovation, and the ONE26 uses round versions of the older systems, named RTCC and RHVS.

Testing is part of how the company presents itself. Revent runs what it calls Artisan Test Bakeries in Upplands Väsby, in New Jersey and in Mexico. It describes the Swedish one as part of its research and production-sample testing, and as a training hub for its service programme; customers can attend baking demonstrations and training sessions there.

Bakery equipment makers.

Bakery equipment makers sell machines, but what they show is mostly dough. The picture language of the trade is familiar: dough sheets gliding along white belts, laminated croissant lines, rack ovens opening on golden trays, deck ovens with stone soles, and flour-dusted hands beside stainless machines.

The test bakery is part of that presentation. Rademaker invites customers to its Technology Centre in Culemborg to try their products with its technologists and test bakers, and it runs an Experience Centre near Chicago; Sveba Dahlen says its Bakery Innovation Centers let distributors and customers test its machines using their own recipes and ingredients, with master bakers on hand. In both cases the offer is to see a recipe run on the machine.

The calendar runs on trade fairs, and that is where the machines are seen working. iba, held in Düsseldorf in 2025, returns to Munich from 24 to 28 October 2027, its organiser says. At the 2025 show, World Bakers reported, a Glimek bread line was to be demonstrated live with dough several times a day. Sigep World meets in Rimini in January 2027, IBIE in Las Vegas in September 2028, and südback at Messe Stuttgart. Sirha Bake & Snack, where the old Europain web address now leads, is next in Paris in January 2028.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its machines are made. Company statements are given as company statements. Where a maker publishes no brand colours or typefaces, the palette and type here are our own interpretation.

A name made of air, a motto made of bread.

The company’s legal name is Revent International AB, and Upplands Väsby remains its head office. Revent says it has production facilities in Sweden and in the USA, six sales offices, and ovens baking daily in more than 100 countries. Bakers Journal reported the same reach in 2017, along with a North American headquarters and production facility in New Jersey. Its contact page now lists subsidiaries in Somerset, New Jersey, in Mexico City and in Prague, plus contacts for Asia Pacific, in Australia, and the Middle East, in Jordan. A recruitment notice for the company from March 2025 described subsidiaries in the USA, the Czech Republic and Mexico and distributors in about 50 countries. The undated Just Food profile lists regional offices in Piscataway, New Jersey, Moscow and Prague.

The wider Revent language is about bakers rather than machinery. The site’s customer section is headed “In Bread We Trust”, its about page carries the line “We Know Bakers – Bakers Know Us,” and its stated commitment is to “quality bread and pastry for all people in a sustainable world.” Its customer stories run from Lindebergs Bageri & Konditori in Orminge, Stockholm, to Carreras Forn de Pa in Sabadell, Spain, and Yu-Jan-Shin Foods in Taiwan. The company calls itself “a leading manufacturer of rotating rack ovens”; that is its own description.

For a design guide, Revent shows how a technical word can become a brand: the name records an engineering idea, and the round oven turns that same engineering into something customers can watch. Compare Sveba Dahlen, another Swedish oven maker, and MIWE, the German family company. For this guide we use oven black, crust brown and flour white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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