Sammic Brand Guidelines: The Basque Kitchen-Equipment Maker Founded in 1961

Local entrepreneurs and a tourist boom.

Sammic dates itself to 1961. Its website describes the company as a “FoodService Equipment Manufacturer since 1961,” and the exhibitor profile it supplied to HRC, the London hospitality and catering show, says it was founded that year in Azpeitia, in Gipuzkoa in the Spanish Basque Country, when a group of local entrepreneurs saw the opportunity created by the growing tourist boom. The same profile speaks of “modest beginnings” and of growth into an international maker of professional catering equipment, and it describes the company as looking firmly towards the future after more than 60 years.

Today Sammic gives its headquarters and its export department at an industrial estate in Azkoitia, the neighbouring town. The two towns share a valley: Spanish Wikipedia, in its article on the local basketball club Iraurgi Saski Baloia, explains that the club takes its name from the old Iraurgi valley, which takes in both Azpeitia and Azkoitia. The club was founded in 1975 and plays its home games in Azpeitia, the encyclopedia says.

That club is where the Sammic name reached a wider public. Spanish Wikipedia lists the men’s team as Sammic ISB from 2014 to 2017 and as Sammic Hostelería in 2017–18, sponsorship names that followed Azpeitia Azkoitia ISB and preceded Juaristi ISB. Under the Sammic name the team won the 2016–17 LEB Plata, the third tier of Spanish basketball, and was promoted to LEB Oro, the second, Wikipedia records; English Wikipedia dates that title to 15 April 2017 and still introduces the club as Sammic Hostelería. The sponsorship put the name of a kitchen-equipment maker on a national basketball league for four seasons.

Preparation, washing, packing and sous-vide.

Sammic presents its range in a few broad families. The HRC profile lists warewashing — glasswashers, dishwashers and utensil washers — then food preparation, covering vegetable preparation machines, cutters, mixers, blenders and sous-vide equipment, and finally vacuum packers. On its own website the sous-vide side carries a separate name, SmartVide.

The vegetable machines carry the CA name. The CA-31 is a single-speed motor block with a regular hopper and the CA-41 a single-speed block with a large production attachment, the HRC listing says. Sammic publishes a “cutting guide” showing the different cuts its CA slicers make with interchangeable discs and grids, and for onions and other watery vegetables it promotes the Déli-cut PLUS, a fitting for a five-by-five-by-six-millimetre dice, under the hashtag #ThePerfectCut.

The cutters sit in what the company calls its Ultra Heavy Duty line. The KE-5V and KE-8V are cutter-mixers and emulsifiers with adjustable-speed “brushless” motor blocks, bowls of 5.5 and 8 litres, toothed blades and a “cut&mix” scraper, according to Sammic’s listing. Its newest commercial immersion blenders, the XMT range, are marketed as #TheLightweightBeast, built, the company says, for kitchens that want power and heavy use without extra weight.

Sous-vide also has a teaching side. The website hosts a free video course in ten chapters on sous-vide and low-temperature cooking with the chef Enrique Fleischmann, made for hospitality professionals and enthusiasts, and presents the SmartVide XL with a 120P tank as a retherming and cooking station for high-volume kitchens. In warewashing, the newest model it names is the UX-150, an XL pass-through dishwasher in its Ultra range.

The company sells through national sites. Its website links to Sammic sites for Spain, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, the United States and Asia, and the HRC profile gives a British company, Sammic Ltd, in Leicester. Sammic also keeps a list of the trade fairs where it exhibits on its own stand.

Machines for the prep kitchen.

Makers of commercial food-preparation equipment sell to a practical audience: chefs, bar owners, butchers, bakers and the dealers who fit out their kitchens. Their brands are built less on advertising than on catalogues, spec sheets and demonstrations, and the machines themselves, slicers, mixers, stick blenders, juicers and vegetable cutters, do most of the talking.

The imagery of the category is consistent. Machines are shown as cut-outs on white for the catalogue, or set on stainless-steel counters in a working prep kitchen, often with a chef’s hands at the controls. Close-ups of blades, discs, bowls and whisks stand in for the engineering inside, and a colour on a base or a housing can become part of a machine’s identity.

Trade fairs carry much of the brand work. Host in Milan, Internorga in Hamburg and the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago are among the shows where makers set up working stands, run live demonstrations and launch new models to importers and dealers; Dynamic says it launched its combined vegetable slicer at Host, and Santos says it chose a limited colour for its #11 juicer after a visitor vote there in 2019.

Some of these makers are independent companies and some sit within larger industrial groups, and several make the place where their machines are built part of their identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A slogan, a hashtag and short model codes.

Much of Sammic’s brand work is done in words. The company signs off with the hashtag #TheRightChoice, which also framed its anniversary line, “Over 60 Years of #TheRightChoice,” in the HRC profile. Product lines get their own tags: #ThePerfectCut for the onion dicer and #TheLightweightBeast for the XMT blenders. Model names stay short — CA, KE, XMT, UX — followed by numbers and letters.

The website mixes product news with practical material. In November 2026 its home page put the XMT launch beside the cutting guide, the list of fairs, the Fleischmann training series, the Déli-cut PLUS and the SmartVide retherming station. Its global site is offered in Spanish, Basque, English, French and German; the English, Spanish and German page titles all carry the founding year, 1961, beside a description of the company as a maker of equipment for hospitality and food service. The headquarters address under the pages is the Azkoitia one.

The company has stayed in the valley where it says it began. It traces its start to Azpeitia, gives its address in Azkoitia, and for four seasons lent its name to the basketball club that takes its own name from the valley the two towns share.

For a design guide, Sammic shows how a long-running equipment maker can carry its identity in a slogan, a set of hashtags and plain model codes. Compare Robot-Coupe, the French maker of professional food processors, and Fimar, an Italian maker of preparation machines. For this guide we use a deep slate, a brushed-steel grey and a pepper red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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