Omcan Brand Guidelines: The Mississauga Food-Equipment Supplier Serving Kitchens Since 1951

Italian slicers in Southern Ontario.

Omcan is a food-service equipment and supplies company based in Mississauga, Ontario, west of Toronto. Its website carries the line “Serving the Food Industry Since 1951” and says the business “started by selling Italian-made slicers in Southern Ontario” 75 years ago. In August 2026 it marked that anniversary with a post headed “Celebrating 75 Years of Serving the Food Industry,” which describes its growth from “a dedicated food equipment supplier” into a supplier of restaurants, bakeries, cafés, butcher shops and commercial kitchens across North America. The 1951 date and the slicer story are the company’s own account; its website does not name the people who started the business.

The legal name on its website is Omcan Inc. For much of its history it traded as Omcan Food Machinery. In 2012, the company says, “as our footprint and brand recognition expanded,” it shortened the name to Omcan, “a name that reflects our commitment to delivering complete solutions beyond machinery.” The change matches what it sells today: alongside slicers, mixers and meat grinders, its catalogue runs from knives and cleavers to bakeware, food storage containers, refrigeration and cleaning products.

Omcan sells through dealers. Its home page credits its success to “established relationships with all of our valued distributors,” and its website sends buyers to authorised dealers through a dealer locator, with separate dealer portals for Canada and the United States.

A supplier listed among slicer makers.

Omcan presents itself as a supplier rather than a single factory. It describes its range as “high quality globally sourced products,” and the pages of its website we read do not say where individual products are made. The origin story it tells is an importer’s: Italian-made slicers, sold in Southern Ontario.

The trade press counts it among the slicer makers all the same. In November 2016 Foodservice Equipment Reports, an American trade magazine, included Omcan Inc. in its list of meat-type slicer manufacturers in a maintenance guide, alongside Berkel, Bizerba, Globe and Hobart. In July 2018 the same magazine’s account of the rebuilt kitchen at The French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s restaurant in Yountville, California, listed an Omcan meat grinder in the equipment schedule, in the same kitchen as a Berkel slicer, Robot Coupe food processors and Vitamix blenders.

Its food-equipment categories, as its website lists them, include food processing, with bread graters and slicers, commercial food processors and peelers; meat processing, with bowl cutters, band saws and fish scalers; dough processing, with dividers, rounders, rollers and sheeters; and food preservation, with wrapping machines, sealers and dry-ageing and curing cabinets. It also sells concession equipment such as hot-dog rollers and cotton-candy machines, and beverage equipment including coffee and bubble-tea machines.

American buying groups have noted its growth. In April 2021 Foodservice Equipment Reports reported that the Excell group had given Omcan one of seven Excellerator Awards to vendors for double-digit annual growth; in February 2022 the magazine reported that Nissco, another buying group, had named Omcan among fourteen vendors receiving a New Horizons Award for the same reason.

The professional food-prep trade.

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.

Warehouses, dealers and a second brand.

Today, the company says, Omcan operates more than 250,000 square feet of warehouse space across three distribution centres and stocks more than 6,500 products. Its head office and Canadian centre are in Mississauga; a western United States centre is at Santa Fe Springs, near Los Angeles; and an eastern centre is listed under Buffalo, New York. Its human-resources page gives an older figure of more than 200,000 square feet. The company says it offers customer service in English, Spanish and French, and has trained technicians for parts and service. Its website also runs MyOmcan, an online service through which customers order and check pricing, along with a rebates page and a scratch-and-dent section for marked stock.

In 2024 it added a second brand, Trento, which the company calls “our premium vertical dedicated to European brands for which Omcan holds exclusive distribution rights in North America.” The Trento website describes itself as an exclusive brand of Omcan Inc. and lists makers including Alfa Forni, Pacojet, Santos and Valoriani, alongside equipment sold under the Trento Exclusive name. Omcan’s stated vision is “to become a market leader in Canada and a major player in the USA,” in the food equipment and smallware business.

Its values, as listed on its website, are teamwork, service excellence, accountability, respect and integrity, and its motto for its own history is “From Humble Beginnings Come Great Things!” The “Since 1951” line appears in the header and footer of its website, and the single Omcan name covers a catalogue that runs from meat grinders and dough sheeters to tongs and oven mitts.

For a design guide, Omcan shows how a supplier builds a brand on range, stock and service rather than on one signature machine. Compare Santos, one of the European makers in Omcan’s Trento line, and Berkel, another name in the slicer trade. For this guide we use a deep navy and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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