Hoonved Brand Guidelines: The Varese Glasswasher Maker Named After a Football Team

A glasswasher that started in a garage.

Hoonved makes commercial glasswashers and dishwashers at Venegono Superiore, in the province of Varese, north-west of Milan. The company names Erminio Dall’Oglio as its founder. It says that after an earlier success with a peanut dispenser, he showed a brush-type mechanical glasswasher at the Milan trade fair, and that this machine, the Universal, used hydraulic rather than electric force to turn its brushes. Production, the company says, began in the garage beneath his home before moving to the large plant it uses today.

The start date differs even in the company’s own telling. Its about page says the Universal was unveiled in 1965, its milestone list gives the launch as 1967, and the same page carries the line “professional dishwashers since 1963.” The German business site Wirtschaftsforum, in a 2019 profile, gives 1967 as the year Hoonved began making dishwashers for professional use, with the Universal as its first product, and says new machines followed regularly through the 1970s and 1980s as the brand became known abroad. The company lists its 50th anniversary in 2017.

The name comes from football. The company says Dall’Oglio admired the fighting spirit of Honvéd, the Hungarian army team of the 1950s, and added an extra “o” to make the name of his company.

The early milestones the company lists trace a steady widening of the range. In 1972, it says, it brought out automatic espresso cup washers with a rotating basket, which it describes as the first of their kind; in 1978 it produced its first warewashers for bakers, butchers, supermarkets and the food industry; and in 1985 it began what it calls the Sunrise Project, a line of machines built around wash cycles with clean water, high pressure and continuous discharge, a system the company says is patented.

From cup washers to conveyor machines.

Today the range runs from small machines under a bar counter to long conveyors in institutional kitchens. Ali Group, its owner, describes Hoonved’s line as undercounter and hood-type glasswashers and dishwashers for bars and restaurants, conveyor dishwashers for institutional catering, and universal pot and utensil washers for delicatessen and confectionery production, with Wi-Fi connection and remote control on its machines.

On its own website the company sorts that range into families. Undercounter glasswashers and dishwashers include the Hygea, CE, TL and AP series; pass-through, or hood-type, machines include the CAP and TLx; utensil washers include the HPW; and conveyors run from the Hydra rack-conveyor series to the HB basket conveyors, with X Dry drying modules alongside. It also sells water softeners, reverse-osmosis units and its own chemicals, and a connected service it calls H-Cloud. The company lists the Hygea series and the updated TLx and APx as new in 2025 and the Hydra series as new in 2026.

The Wirtschaftsforum profile singled out the TL glasswasher, with four functions and an economy programme, and described a portfolio that also takes in top-loading hood machines, washers for large pots and pans, and simpler models reduced to a few essential functions. It reported that Hoonved had 65 employees, made 10,000 machines a year at Venegono Superiore and exported about 70 per cent of them, with France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland among its markets.

The company says every machine is made entirely in-house, “from steel sheet to finished product,” and that each one is tested individually before it leaves the factory, with a report of the results. It lists the introduction of its Break Tank system in 2008 and says that in 2010 it was the first in the sector to fit a heat pump to warewashers. It presents its customers by business area: bars and cafés, restaurants, bakeries and butchers, fast food, institutional catering and hospitals, and marine use.

Design and documentation.

Commercial dishwasher makers sell to professional kitchens rather than households. Their catalogues are sorted by how the ware moves: undercounter machines and glasswashers that sit beneath a bar or counter, hood-type or door-type machines that wash one rack at a time, rack conveyors for bigger runs of baskets, and flight-type machines that carry plates on a continuous belt. Hobart and Comenda both organise their ranges in this way on their websites.

The customer lists read like a map of institutional eating. Hobart names restaurants, hotels, hospitals, long-term care, schools and grocery retailers; Comenda adds pastry shops, ships, central kitchens and airline caterers, and says its flight-type machines are built for large canteens, hospitals and inflight catering. The baskets themselves come in standard sizes: Comenda quotes racks of 400 by 400 and 500 by 500 millimetres.

The trade meets at fairs rather than in shops. INTERNORGA, held every year in Hamburg, describes itself as a platform for hospitality and foodservice, with a hall area for kitchen technology and equipment, and plans its 100th edition for March 2027. In Milan, HostMilano is another fixed date; the American trade magazine Foodservice Equipment Reports keeps photo galleries from its 2023 and 2025 editions. Comenda’s own awards page lists an innovation prize from the Rest’Hotel fair in Caen.

Ownership in this sector often runs through large groups. Hobart is a brand of Illinois Tool Works’ food-equipment group; Comenda was the first company of Italy’s Ali Group, which has since gathered further warewashing names. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

Part of Ali Group since 1996.

Hoonved did not stay independent. Ali Group, the Italian catering-equipment group, lists Hoonved among its acquisitions of 1996, alongside the Italian makers Mareno and OEM, and Wirtschaftsforum reported that the group bought all of the company’s shares that year while Hoonved kept its own identity and way of working. The company’s legal name today is Hoonved Ali Group S.r.l., and it still names Venegono Superiore as its base. It describes Ali Group as founded in Italy in 1963 and as a group of 76 brands across cooking, refrigeration, coffee and warewashing; Ali Group lists Hoonved in its washing and waste-management segment, alongside Comenda and DIHR.

After the takeover the company looked further afield. Its milestone list puts its expansion into export markets in 2000, and by the time of the 2019 profile most of its output went abroad. Its managing director, Andrea Bertone, told Wirtschaftsforum that the company still sells products but that service had become more important than ever, and that it adopted new technology only when it worked and made sense rather than copying competitors. The company says it supports buyers through a network of dealers and service centres, with installation, training and spare parts, and a Hoonved Dishwashing Forum.

The brand’s look has also changed. On 8 February 2019 Ali Group announced a new logo and new visual identity for Hoonved, which presented the refreshed look at the Sigep trade fair that year. The company’s website now leads with the phrase “all-round washing solutions,” and its own story is told under three words: people, passion and innovation.

For a design guide, Hoonved shows how a small Varese workshop’s origin story — a garage, a glasswasher and a borrowed football name — can carry a brand through decades inside a large group. Compare Comenda, another Italian warewashing maker in Ali Group, and DIHR. For this guide we use a deep harbour blue, brushed steel and a pale rinse grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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