FETCO Brand Guidelines: The 1987 Lake Zurich Batch Brewer Maker Behind the Extractor

Two founders and a brewer for busy counters.

FETCO began in 1987 in Lake Zurich, Illinois, in the Chicago area. The company’s own history names its founders as Christopher Nowak and Zbigniew Lassota, and says they started developing commercial brewing equipment that year after seeing a need for dependable machines in food service. Daily Coffee News, the trade site of Roast magazine, gave the same year, place and founders in February 2023, naming the second founder as “Ziggy” Lassota.

The company writes its name in capitals, usually followed by the registered-trademark sign, and its trademark page lists FETCO, EXTRACTOR, LUXUS and Millenia among its marks, together with the line “Driven To Pioneer innovation.” Its pages present the brand with three plain words, “Trusted. Reliable. Quality.”

FETCO describes itself as a privately owned and operated business and says it manufactures each of its products at its factory headquarters in Lake Zurich; those are the company’s own statements. In March 2025 Daily Coffee News named Christopher Nowak as FETCO’s president and chief executive, quoting him in an announcement about a grinder distribution deal. A year earlier the same publication had described FETCO as a 37-year-old Illinois equipment company that specialises in batch brewing equipment, and in 2023 it said the company had grown to national and international prominence through the sale and distribution of a wide range of commercial beverage equipment.

The firm also publishes a tour of its factory under the heading “An Inside Look at Our Factory,” where it repeats that innovation has been its priority “since 1987.”

Tower brewers, touchscreens and tea.

FETCO’s core products are batch brewers: machines that brew coffee or tea by the batch rather than by the single cup. Its catalogue groups them into the NG series, the Extractor Plus series, the older XTS series (now listed as international only), handle-operated and high-volume brewers, maritime brewers, multi-beverage systems and iced and hot tea brewers. Beside the brewers it lists coffee and tea dispensers, hot water dispensers, grinders and accessories.

The Plus Series was launched at the Specialty Coffee Association’s Expo in Boston in 2022, Daily Coffee News reported. The NG, short for “Next Generation,” followed in February 2023, when the company presented it at the NAFEM Show in Orlando. The publication described the NG as building on the familiar FETCO tower brewer format, with a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen in full colour; Michael Lassota, FETCO’s chief technology officer at the time, told it the screen allowed the swipes and sliders people know from smartphones, in place of the resistive screens of the XTS models.

Through that screen, the report said, an operator can set water temperature, program three volumes for the hot water spout and set the sequence of water pulses over the brew basket, and the machine stores up to eight brewing profiles. A status light changes colour to show when the machine is ready, brewing or needs attention. After NAFEM, the report said, the NG was due to be shown at the Bar and Restaurant Expo in Las Vegas and the Specialty Coffee Expo in Portland, Oregon, in spring 2023. According to the company, the exterior panels of the NG and Plus machines are riveted rather than spot-welded, internal parts are reached from the front for service, and the boilers use laser-welded tanks.

The category.

Commercial coffee machine makers sell mainly to businesses rather than to homes. Their customers are hotel groups, coffee-shop chains, office caterers and restaurants, and their products sit on hotel breakfast buffets, office counters, convenience-store shelves and behind café bars. Some build fully automatic machines that grind, dose, brew and froth milk at the touch of a screen; others build large batch brewers that fill urns and airpots for a busy service.

Much of the trade grew from a practical problem. SWI swissinfo.ch reported in 2024 that Swiss restaurants in the 1970s faced higher wage costs and fewer staff behind the buffet, and the historian Jonathan Morris told the publication that Swiss automatic machines set out to make coffee and milk drinks simpler for staff without barista training. Switzerland remains a centre of that business, with makers in Weggis, Zuchwil and elsewhere.

The machines now present themselves through screens and options as much as through steel. In 2025 TOP HOTEL Projects described one fully automatic model offered with touchscreens of two sizes, modes for staff service, self-service and office use, and interchangeable panels in a customer’s chosen colour. Milk systems, cleaning routines and service networks also feature in how these makers describe what they offer.

Launches tend to happen at trade fairs rather than in shops. HOST Milano, the hospitality fair held in Milan, is one such stage; specialty-coffee events such as World of Coffee are another. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brewer maker that became a distributor too.

Over the past few years FETCO has added other makers’ equipment to its own. In November 2022 Daily Coffee News reported a partnership for manufacturing and distribution with Hardtank, a Polish maker of cold brew equipment, with orders for the Baby Hardtank due to open in early 2023, and noted that a related Hardtank countertop system had won a Best New Product award at World of Coffee that year. FETCO now presents the machine as “developed by Hardtank, manufactured by FETCO.” In March 2024 the same publication reported that FETCO had become the US distributor of the Canadian maker Brood’s DRNX nitro and cold brew dispensers.

In March 2025 FETCO and Hemro Group, the Zurich-based owner of the Mahlkönig grinder brand, signed an exclusive agreement for FETCO to distribute Ditting grinders in the United States, Daily Coffee News reported, noting that the Ditting brand had been handled by other US distributors before. The publication said Hemro, which also owns Anfim and HeyCafé, positions Ditting grinders for high-volume settings such as coffee packing lines, supermarket bulk-bean displays and busy cafés beside batch brewers. FETCO’s site also sells a granita machine branded “FETCO by ELMECO.” For Canada, FETCO has announced that Specialty Beverage Solutions will become its exclusive master distributor, with Canadian orders going to that company from 1 December 2026.

The company shows its equipment at trade events it lists on its own site, including the Specialty Coffee Expo, the Re:co Symposium and World of Coffee, and runs its own road show and technician training events.

For a design guide, FETCO shows how a working brand can live mostly on the machine itself: a name set in capitals, product names like Extractor and NG, and controls that have moved to a full-colour touchscreen. Compare Bunn, another American batch brewer maker, and Marco Beverage Systems, which also builds filter brewers for cafés. For this guide we use a near-black, a brushed steel grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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