Blodgett Brand Guidelines: The Burlington Oven Maker Founded in 1848, Owned by Middleby

A plumber, a complaint and a wood-burning oven.

Blodgett starts with a complaint about meat. According to the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories (volume 61, 2004), Gardner S. Blodgett was a plumber who kept a store in Burlington, Vermont. In 1848, when he was 29, the owner of a nearby tavern told him his oven was cooking meat on one side but not the other. Blodgett and a partner built a wood-burning oven that solved the problem, and other tavern keepers soon asked for ovens of their own.

By 1854, the same history says, Blodgett had patented an improved baking oven and incorporated the business as G.S. Blodgett & Company. That is why some summaries give 1854 as the founding year, while the company itself counts from 1848; its website says it has been making ovens for commercial kitchens “since 1848 when a local Vermont tavern was in need.”

After the Civil War, the directory says, Blodgett rebuilt the business and widened the range, adding deck ovens and conveyor ovens. In 1892 John S. Patrick, who had joined as secretary and treasurer, bought the founder’s interest. That began three generations of Patrick family control.

Under the Patricks the company spread beyond Vermont. It began developing gas-fired ovens in 1902. In 1918 it set up Pitco Frialator in Bow, New Hampshire, to make commercial fryers, and in 1931 it added MagiKitch’n in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, to make charbroilers. During the Second World War, the directory records, the United States government placed contracts with Blodgett for ovens used by the Army and Navy.

The postwar decades brought a line of pizza deck ovens in the 1950s and, in 1958, the company’s first foreign distributor. Blodgett sold to fast-food chains, schools, hospitals, hotels and small local pizzerias alike, the directory says.

From family firm to Middleby brand.

The 1980s changed both the products and the owners. In 1981, English Wikipedia’s biography of the company’s longtime general counsel Frederick M. Reed says, the G. S. Blodgett Oven Company bought J.C. Pitman & Sons of Concord, New Hampshire, a maker of fryers and other kitchen equipment. In 1982, the directory says, Blodgett bought Q Industries, a small conveyor-oven maker in Chicago.

In 1985 Blodgett bought the rights to a multifunction steamer oven from a German manufacturer, and a year later it set up Blodgett Combi, a division producing that combination oven alongside its MasterTherm conveyor ovens, according to the directory. Combi ovens are still part of the range on the company’s website today.

Ownership moved next. In 1988 the Patrick family sold the company through a management-led buyout, the directory says, led by Doug Johnson, president since 1985, and Sam Hartwell, with financing arranged through The First Boston Corporation and Metropolitan Life. The new owners closed or sold loss-making divisions, moved the conveyor-oven business from Chicago to Burlington, and in the early 1990s began exhibiting at trade shows in London, Prague, Singapore and Sydney. In 1995 Blodgett International became an operating unit of G.S. Blodgett Corporation.

In October 1997 the home-appliance group Maytag bought Blodgett and set up Blodgett Holdings, Inc. as its holding company. The fit did not last. In 2001, the directory says, Maytag decided to concentrate on home appliances, and in August that year it agreed to sell Blodgett Holdings and its subsidiaries to The Middleby Corporation of Elgin, Illinois. The deal closed in December 2001.

Middleby itself began in Chicago in 1888 as a bakery supplier founded by Joseph Middleby and John Marshall, English Wikipedia says, and today lists Blodgett, Pitco and Magic Kitch’n among its commercial cooking brands. After the purchase, the directory says, two Blodgett factories, in Williston and Shelburne, Vermont, were closed, and new products followed, including the Blodgett Range in 2002 and a combi model that steamed without a boiler.

How oven makers show 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.

Still in Vermont, a few miles from where it began.

Blodgett has stayed in Vermont under Middleby. In January 2014 Middleby bought the assets of Market Forge Industries, a maker of steam equipment, and moved its production, sales and engineering from Everett, Massachusetts, to a new Blodgett facility in Essex, Vermont, Foodservice Equipment & Supplies reported in July 2014.

Three years later the company left Burlington. In June 2017, Vermont Business Magazine reported, Middleby sold Blodgett’s property on Lakeside Avenue, where the company had been since the 1940s, and bought a larger manufacturing facility in Essex. The release it carried described Blodgett as making convection and combi ovens and steam equipment under the Blodgett and Market Forge names. Burlington’s mayor called it “a 170-year-old company” leaving the city.

Today the company says it is based in Essex Junction, Vermont, “just a short drive” from where its founder started, and that its Vermont facility is where its products are built and checked before they leave the factory. Its website calls itself a “Proud Member of the Middleby Family of Brands” and uses the phrase “Built Like a Blodgett” for its promise of durability; those are the company’s own words.

The current range, as the website sets it out, runs from convection ovens such as the Mark V and Zephaire series to Hydrovection ovens, Invoq combi ovens, deck and pizza ovens and a group of ventless models. The same site features chefs and pizzeria owners in a testimonial series it calls “G.O.A.T. Stories,” and points visitors to test kitchens across the Middleby family.

For a design guide, Blodgett shows how a 19th-century workshop name can carry through a long chain of owners: the family, a buyout, an appliance group and an equipment group. Compare Lincat, another Middleby brand, from Lincoln in England, and TurboChef, a Middleby speed-oven name. For this guide we use cast-iron charcoal, slate and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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