Alto-Shaam Brand Guidelines: The Wisconsin Family Maker Named by Spelling Maahs Backwards

A franchise owner’s problem in the Wisconsin winter.

Alto-Shaam began with a delivery problem. The company says its founder, Jerry Maahs, entered the food business by buying a Chicken Delight franchise store and grew it to 13 locations, and that he started experimenting with ways to keep chicken hot for customers through the Wisconsin winter. In a 2016 interview with FCSI, the magazine of the Foodservice Consultants Society International, his son Steve Maahs told the same story: delivery equipment of the time did not keep food warm, so his father invented a heating system of his own, which became Halo Heat.

The name came from a purchase. Alto-Shaam says Maahs bought the Alto Distributing Company and paired its name with his family name spelled backwards; “Shaam” is “Maahs” reversed, as FCSI also notes. The company gives its incorporation date as January 26, 1955, and FCSI likewise says Jerry Maahs founded it in 1955.

According to the company’s timeline, Maahs fitted his heated boxes into Volkswagen Beetle delivery cars, then stepped away from his restaurant franchises to design and make equipment full time. He developed the original Cook & Hold oven, which the company says created a new category of low-temperature cooking, and showed it at the 1968 National Restaurant Association Show. The first factory, the company says, was a 7,500-square-foot building in Milwaukee; a larger Milwaukee plant followed, and the company later built its global headquarters in Menomonee Falls, about 30 minutes north of the city.

Halo Heat, Combitherm and Vector.

Through the 1970s Alto-Shaam extended Halo Heat from holding cabinets into waterless food wells, hot food tables, carving stations and heated display cases, the company says, and began exporting to Canada, Europe and Asia. In the 1980s, it says, it received the Presidential “E” Star Award from the federal government for its export work, and split its domestic sales into a retail division serving grocery and convenience chains and a foodservice division for restaurants.

The company says Jerry Maahs came across combi cooking, which joins convection heat and steam in one cabinet, on his travels in Europe, and that in the 1990s Alto-Shaam became the first US manufacturer of combi ovens. It adds that the move met resistance from people who saw the company as a low-temperature specialist, and that it then had to teach customers how to cook with the new machines. In the 2000s, it says, its manufacturers’ representatives added test kitchens and chefs, so that customers could watch live cooking demonstrations. Its combi ovens are sold under the Combitherm name, and sales offices in France and China followed. In the 2010s, according to the company, the CombiTouch control for the Combitherm won a Kitchen Innovation Award, and the Vector multi-cook oven, built around what it calls Structured Air Technology, won another.

More recent launches include ChefLinc, a system for managing ovens remotely over the internet, and the Converge multi-cook oven, which the company describes as up to three independent combination ovens in one. Its range today also takes in convection ovens, smoker ovens, rotisserie ovens and blast chillers. FCSI’s 2016 interview singled out the cook-and-hold smoker line as one of the company’s staple products, one that Steve Maahs helped test as a teenager working summers in the plant.

How oven makers present themselves.

Commercial ovens are bought by chefs, restaurant chains and kitchen designers rather than by shoppers, and their makers present them that way. Catalogues and websites lean on stainless steel product shots against plain backgrounds, close-ups of touch-screen control panels, and oven fronts photographed in working restaurant, bakery and convenience-store kitchens, often with a chef at the door.

The category covers several kinds of machine. Combi steamers join convection heat and steam in one cabinet; speed ovens pair fast-moving hot air with other sources of heat; conveyor and deck ovens serve pizza and baking; and charcoal ovens put live fire inside a closed box. Many makers sell more than one kind, and several of these names now sit inside larger equipment groups, Middleby of Elgin, Illinois, among them, rather than standing alone.

Much of the selling happens face to face. HostMilano in Milan, Internorga in Hamburg and the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago are among the fairs where makers show new ovens, often with chefs cooking on the stand. Alto-Shaam says it first showed its Cook & Hold oven at the 1968 NRA Show, and the makers’ own websites still point buyers to test kitchens and live cooking demonstrations, where an oven can be judged by what comes out of it. TurboChef’s website offers a way to find one of its test kitchens, and Alto-Shaam’s lists demonstrations and virtual events under the name Taste of Alto-Shaam.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and where its ovens are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three generations in Menomonee Falls.

Alto-Shaam has stayed in the family. The company says the second generation joined in the late 1980s, with Jerry Maahs’s daughter Karen Hansen leading the retail division and Steve Maahs in inside sales, and that Hansen later became chief executive and chairwoman, with Maahs as president and chief operating officer. In the 2016 FCSI interview Steve Maahs described himself and his sister as “50-50 owners.” The company’s timeline for the 2020s records Steve Maahs becoming chief executive and Karen Hansen chairwoman of the board, and third-generation family members working in sales, culinary and operations. It describes itself as “a multi-generational private company.” Steve Maahs told FCSI that he started working summers in the factory at 16, spent 1986 with an Alto-Shaam retail distributor in Florida and joined the company’s inside sales team in 1988.

Production is centred on Menomonee Falls. FCSI reported in 2016 that Alto-Shaam made all its products there, with automation, robotic welding and laser cutting in the plant, a workforce of 440 and a 25,000-square-foot expansion completed in 2013. The company now says the site covers more than 450,000 square feet after the addition of an Innovation Center and warehouse, and that it supplies equipment “made in the USA” to more than 90 countries. It has also built a manufacturing facility in India, which it says produces Halo Heat products for the regional market.

For a design guide, Alto-Shaam shows a family name worked into a brand by turning it backwards. Compare RATIONAL, the German company built on the combi oven, and Convotherm, the Bavarian combi-oven maker. For this guide we use a deep slate, a pale steel and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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