DeLaval Brand Guidelines: AB Separator’s Dairy Line, Tumba and the VMS Milking Robot

A cream separator and a Stockholm company.

DeLaval makes milking and farm equipment, and its name is much younger than its history. The company says it was founded in 1883 as AB Separator by Gustaf de Laval, the Swedish engineer who set out to separate cream from milk by continuous centrifugal force. The European Route of Industrial Heritage says he perfected his machine in 1878; DeLaval also says he patented it that year, while English Wikipedia gives 1887 for the patent. The International Directory of Company Histories dates manual cream separators to 1887, a later step.

De Laval did not work alone. On 26 February 1878, the Directory records, he entered into partnership with the engineer Oscar Lamm, who took the financial and commercial side while de Laval took the technical side. Their trading company became AB Separator in 1883. English Wikipedia says it built 53 separators in its first year and exported 37 of them. In 1889 the company bought the Alfa patent from the German inventor Clemens von Bechtolsheim, the purchase that later supplied half of the Alfa-Laval name.

DeLaval credits its founder with 92 Swedish patents and 37 companies. He also worked on steam turbines, but the dairy line is the one that continues under his name. In the United States the De Laval Cream Separator Company ran a production site at Poughkeepsie, New York, according to English Wikipedia.

Milking machines, Hamra and the VMS.

The move from the dairy to the milking stall took decades. The European Route of Industrial Heritage records a milking machine patent by de Laval in 1894. DeLaval’s own 2017 anniversary release tells a later story: a young New Zealander, Norman John Daysh, travelled to the United States in 1913 with a milking machine of his own design, and the company developed it with him into a pulsating-vacuum machine patented in 1917. English Wikipedia says marketing began in 1918.

The company’s home farm is Hamra Farm at Tumba, about 30 minutes from central Stockholm. DeLaval says Hamra has been a commercial farm since 1894, and calls it the centre for its research, training and product demonstrations. In September 2025 it announced the largest expansion in the farm’s history: 12,000 square metres of new buildings, including a barn for its milking robots that doubles as a visitor centre.

The robots have a dated record of their own. Progressive Dairy reported in September 2013 that the company obtained its first voluntary milking patent in 1982, installed on-farm robots in Holland through a subsidiary in the early 1990s, and sold its first-generation VMS, for Voluntary Milking System, in 1998. The same report marked the sale of the 10,000th VMS, to a farm in Ontario. The VMS V300 followed in 2018, the V310 in 2019 and a revised 2025 model of the V300 series in April 2025. Around the robots DeLaval sells feeding equipment, including the Optimat system and, from 2023, the OptiWagon feed distribution robot.

Its awards are trade awards. DeLaval says its Evanza milking cluster won a silver medal in the EuroTier innovation awards in 2018, and that its Tumba factory won the Swedish Lean Prize in 2012.

Design and documentation.

Farm technology makers sell to a small, expert audience, and they tend to show the machine at work rather than on a plinth. A milking robot is photographed in a working barn with a calm herd around it, often under the cool blue light of a modern parlour. A feed robot, usually in clean red and white, glides along a barn aisle with no driver in sight. The pictures make one argument again and again: the work carries on while the farmer is elsewhere.

Poultry and hatchery equipment has a different geometry. Long feed lines and drinker lines run down the length of a house to a vanishing point, and hatchery trays stack into tall, regular grids. These are images of repetition, and they suit a trade in which a single building holds a very long run of identical equipment. Irrigation goes the other way, from inside to overhead: drip lines are shown from the air, running through green rows in thin, straight strokes.

The trade meets face to face at a handful of fairs. EuroTier and Agritechnica in Hanover, World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, and the VIV shows for the poultry and livestock industries are where new ranges appear, and some of the awards these companies quote come from such events.

Many of these names are old, and many have changed hands. Family firms, industrial groups and investment companies all appear in this guide, and a founder’s surname often outlives the founder’s company. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who started it, who owns it now, and what it says about where its products are made.

A name taken back in 2000.

The ownership story explains the name. AB Separator became Alfa-Laval in 1963, and in 1991 Tetra Pak bought the group, the Directory records. In 1993 the farm equipment business was organised as a new division, Alfa Laval Agri, while the rest of Alfa Laval became an industrial group inside Tetra Laval and dropped its hyphen. On 19 June 2000 Industri Kapital announced that its 2000 Fund had agreed to buy Alfa Laval from Tetra Laval, which kept a minority interest; the deal was completed that August. The farm business did not go with it. DeLaval says the owners kept that part of the company, and English Wikipedia says Alfa Laval Agri was then renamed DeLaval after the founder. So two Swedish companies now share one origin, one of them an industrial group and the other a farm equipment maker.

Today DeLaval sits alongside Sidel and Tetra Pak in the Tetra Laval Group, and it names Tumba, in Botkyrka south of Stockholm, as its home. In May 2026 it gave its size as approximately 4,800 people working in more than 100 markets. In July 2020 it bought milkrite | InterPuls, a maker of milking point equipment, from the British company Avon Rubber, and said the business would run as a stand-alone company with its own brands.

The company’s own releases point to several production sites. In November 2018 it said staffing on the VMS production line in Sweden had almost doubled, with other plants supplying that line; it has also written about a cooling tank factory at Wroclaw in Poland and a milk filter factory in Finland. Dutch Wikipedia says the competition between DeLaval and Lely is sometimes called blue against red.

For a design guide, DeLaval shows how a company can restore an old family name when a corporate split leaves it needing one. Compare Alfa Laval, the other half of the same history, and Lely, its Dutch counterpart in milking robots. For this guide we use a parlour blue, a deep ink and a milk white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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