Fagor Professional Brand Guidelines: The Basque Cooperative Kitchen and Dishwasher Brand

A cooker department inside a Mondragón cooperative.

Fagor Professional comes out of the cooperative movement of Mondragón, in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa. Spanish Wikipedia traces its family to ULGOR, a workshop bought in the mid-1950s by five partners, Luis Usatorre, Jesús Larrañaga, Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, José María Ormaetxea and Javier Ortubay, whose surnames gave it its name, with the encouragement of the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta. ULGOR began with 24 worker-members making paraffin cookers and stoves, and from 1990 it was called Fagor Electrodomésticos, the household-appliance cooperative, Spanish Wikipedia says.

The professional business started inside it. According to Spanish Wikipedia, Fagor Industrial was born in 1960 in a small department of ULGOR that saw a need for industrial cookers for the hospitality trade; over the next five years it added fryers and boiling pans, and its life as a cooperative of its own began when it entered the general register of cooperatives in 1973. The company’s website today says simply that it started in 1960. Its parent group’s timeline, by contrast, dates the founding of Fagor Industrial in Oñati to 1974, and when that group changed its name in October 2013, Laundry & Cleaning News reported that the change marked its 40th anniversary.

The headquarters is in Oñati, in Gipuzkoa. From there the business spread well beyond the professional kitchen. The group’s own timeline lists a commercial refrigeration plant opened in Lucena, in the province of Córdoba, in 1997, together with the Edesa Hostelera business later renamed Edenox; the purchase of the French laundry-equipment maker Danube in 2000; the acquisition in 2001 of a tumble-dryer factory in Vic, in Catalonia, now Onnera Laundry Barcelona; and a period of international expansion between 2007 and 2012, with sales offices and production plants in America, Europe and Asia.

Glasswashers, hood-type machines and a new name in Milan.

Fagor Professional sells a broad kitchen and laundry range under one name: cooking lines such as Kore and Monoblock, the iKORE ovens, refrigeration and food-preparation machines, and washers, dryers and ironers for laundries. Warewashing is one part of that offer. On its website the dishwashing range runs from glasswashers and front-opening dishwashers to hood-type machines, with rack-type and flight-type conveyor machines and potwashers listed alongside them. The same site points customers to FagorKonnect, its connected services for foodservice and laundry equipment, and to the Onnera Laundry Academy.

The company groups its smaller machines into the E-VO generation, made up of a glasswasher, a front-loading dishwasher and a hood-type dishwasher, and sells them in the Concept, Concept+ and Advance ranges. It describes the glasswashers as compact machines for bars, cafés and restaurants that can sit under or on a counter and take racks of 40 by 40 or 35 by 35 centimetres, while its front-loading dishwashers take 50 by 50 centimetre racks. Hood-type machines, which the company notes are also called dome or chamber dishwashers because of their vertical opening, are aimed at larger kitchens such as school cafeterias, public canteens and staff restaurants.

The present name is recent. On 22 October 2021, in Oñati, the company announced that Fagor Industrial was changing its brand name to Fagor Professional, and it presented the new identity at HostMilano 2021, the Milan hospitality trade fair, alongside the new generation of iKORE ovens, the Monoblock cooking range and MyFagor, a digital services platform for its customers. The company framed the change as putting the end user and its distributors at the centre of its business, and its foodservice director, Carmelo Villanueva, said in the announcement that “we’re evolving the Fagor Industrial brand to become Fagor Professional.”

Design and documentation.

Commercial dishwasher makers sell to professional kitchens rather than households. Their catalogues are sorted by how the ware moves: undercounter machines and glasswashers that sit beneath a bar or counter, hood-type or door-type machines that wash one rack at a time, rack conveyors for bigger runs of baskets, and flight-type machines that carry plates on a continuous belt. Hobart and Comenda both organise their ranges in this way on their websites.

The customer lists read like a map of institutional eating. Hobart names restaurants, hotels, hospitals, long-term care, schools and grocery retailers; Comenda adds pastry shops, ships, central kitchens and airline caterers, and says its flight-type machines are built for large canteens, hospitals and inflight catering. The baskets themselves come in standard sizes: Comenda quotes racks of 400 by 400 and 500 by 500 millimetres.

The trade meets at fairs rather than in shops. INTERNORGA, held every year in Hamburg, describes itself as a platform for hospitality and foodservice, with a hall area for kitchen technology and equipment, and plans its 100th edition for March 2027. In Milan, HostMilano is another fixed date; the American trade magazine Foodservice Equipment Reports keeps photo galleries from its 2023 and 2025 editions. Comenda’s own awards page lists an innovation prize from the Rest’Hotel fair in Caen.

Ownership in this sector often runs through large groups. Hobart is a brand of Illinois Tool Works’ food-equipment group; Comenda was the first company of Italy’s Ali Group, which has since gathered further warewashing names. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

The lead brand of a cooperative group.

Fagor Professional is the lead brand of Onnera Group, the name its business group took in October 2013. Until then it was the Fagor Industrial Group; Laundry & Cleaning News reported on 15 October 2013 that the group would first appear under the new name at the Host fair in Milan that month, with seven brands covering professional kitchens, food distribution, commercial refrigeration and laundry, and that the change did not affect its shareholders, its manufacturing or its existing contracts. The group’s current brands include Fagor Professional, Asber, Efficold and Danube.

Onnera Group describes itself as a cooperative and as part of MONDRAGON, the Basque cooperative group, and speaks of a working community built on shared management. On its corporate pages it lists seven production plants in Spain, France, Poland and Mexico, a dozen sales subsidiaries, seven commercial brands and one service brand, with 2,192 employees, 64 per cent of them in Spain. It created Onnera Contract in 2016 to handle turnkey kitchen projects, and in 2025 it changed its corporate identity. Fagor Professional’s own website marks its production plants in the same four countries and calls MONDRAGON the largest business group in the Basque Country.

For a design guide, Fagor Professional shows a cooperative brand that kept the Fagor name and changed only the word that follows it. Compare Electrolux Professional, another maker of both kitchen and laundry equipment, and Winterhalter, a warewashing specialist. For this guide we use a deep red, charcoal and steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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