Berkel Brand Guidelines: W.A. van Berkel’s 1898 Rotterdam Slicer, Now Split Across Two Owners

A rotating blade and a sliding carriage, Rotterdam, 1898.

Berkel began with a butcher who liked machines. Wilhelmus Adrianus van Berkel, from North Brabant in the southern Netherlands, worked as a butcher with what Dutch Wikipedia calls a passion for mechanics, and he wanted a machine that could cut meat into slices without a hand-held knife. Italian Wikipedia describes the answer he settled on after many attempts: a concave blade turning at right angles to a movable carriage that carried the meat or sausage back and forth across it. The sources read for this guide do not describe the company during the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940–45.

On 12 October 1898 Van Berkel opened his first factory in Rotterdam, according to both Dutch and Italian Wikipedia. The business traded as Van Berkel’s Patent Company Ltd, and in 1899, its first full year, it delivered 84 slicing machines. Italian Wikipedia says output then rose quickly, helped by the practice, unusual at the time, of letting shopkeepers pay for a machine in instalments.

The slicer travelled fast. Berkel’s present-day American business says that by 1907 its machines were in use in England, Belgium, France, Russia, China, Mexico and Canada. It calls the 1898 machine the world’s first meat-slicing machine, a claim made in the company’s own history.

America came next. The same company history says manufacturing of the first American machines began in 1909 at the U.S. Slicing Machine Company in Chicago, and that six years later the business had outgrown its space, built a new factory in La Porte, Indiana, and changed its name to Berkel, Incorporated. From that point the Berkel name had a Dutch parent and an American branch — a split that still matters for anyone reading the name today.

Slicers, scales, lathes — and seaplanes.

The First World War pushed the Rotterdam company well beyond slicers. Dutch and Italian Wikipedia say that during the war its production spread to commercial scales, lathes, mechanical instruments in general — and aircraft.

The aircraft episode is documented in some detail. English Wikipedia’s article on the Van Berkel W-B explains that the neutral Netherlands struggled to buy military aircraft abroad, and that in August 1917 the Ministry of War encouraged companies such as the car maker Spyker to start building them. The only other firm to volunteer was Van Berkel’s Patent, described as a company formed to make meat-processing cutters. It first built the German Hansa-Brandenburg W.12 floatplane fighter under licence as the Van Berkel W-A. In 1919 the Dutch naval air service asked it to design a long-range reconnaissance floatplane for the Dutch East Indies, and the result was the W-B, larger and more powerful than the German W.29 it was based on, with floats of aluminium alloy because wood degraded quickly in tropical water. Six were operated by the naval air service, the article says, with disappointing results, though the last two were not retired until 1933. The company closed its aviation department in June 1921, and a planned civilian version was never built.

Slicers remained the core. The American business today lists B-Series gravity-feed slicers in manual and automatic models, with removable carriages, chrome-plated carbon-steel knives and an anodised aluminium finish; the X13-PLUS Premier series with a hardened stainless-steel 13-inch knife and a one-piece polymer base; countertop bread slicers; and two hand-operated flywheel slicers sold for prosciutto, alongside vacuum-packaging machines.

The flywheel slicer, with its large hand-turned wheel, is the form most closely tied to the name. A Dutch dealer of Berkel slicers lists flywheel models under the Volano name, the Italian word for flywheel, including a reproduction of a Model L labelled “Vintage – 1907” and the Volano B114, offered in red and in black. Old machines have their own trade: a restoration workshop near Piacenza, in Italy, says it has restored historic Berkel slicers and scales since 1984.

Food preparation equipment.

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.

One name, several owners.

Italian Wikipedia says the company stayed under the control of Van Berkel’s heirs for some decades, was bought by the British group GEC in 1993, and in 2004 passed to a group of Italian entrepreneurs. English Wikipedia’s article on Avery Weigh-Tronix adds the scales side of the story: GEC Avery, the former W & T Avery, was merged with Berkel to form Avery Berkel; in June 2000 the American weighing company Weigh-Tronix bought the Avery Berkel group; and in September 2007 Illinois Tool Works bought Avery Berkel, followed in 2008 by Avery Weigh-Tronix itself.

Today the name works in more than one place. In North America, Berkel is a division of ITW Food Equipment Group, according to its own website, which describes it as associated with the Vulcan Food Equipment Group, gives its headquarters as Troy, Ohio after a move from La Porte, and says its equipment is serviced by Hobart Service, another ITW Food Equipment Group division. Dutch Wikipedia, meanwhile, says the company Van Berkel founded still exists with its head office in Italy, and the Volano flywheel slicers are sold through dealers in Europe and elsewhere. Anyone buying or citing Berkel should check which Berkel they mean.

The brand’s pull is visible in the trade in old machines. Restorers and dealers deal in early flywheel slicers as collectable objects: the Piacenza workshop warns buyers about fakes and issues its own certificates of originality, and the Dutch dealer offers new limited editions of the Volano alongside reproductions of the early models. The American range and the Volano line both still pair a turning blade with a carriage that slides past it, the mechanism Van Berkel settled on in Rotterdam.

For a design guide, Berkel shows how a single mechanical idea can carry a name across owners, continents and a hundred-odd years. Compare Globe, the Ohio slicer maker, and Hollymatic, the Illinois maker of patty machines. For this guide we use a deep red, cream and blade-steel grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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