Frima Brand Guidelines: The Wittenheim Name Behind the VarioCookingCenter, Now RATIONAL

A sales partner that became a factory.

Frima is a brand that no longer trades under its own name. It belonged to a French company based at Wittenheim, in Alsace, which became part of the German combi-oven maker RATIONAL in 1992. The English, German and French Wikipedia entries on RATIONAL all record that the company took over its French partner Frima that year, and RATIONAL’s own timeline describes the deal as its former French distribution partner becoming a subsidiary.

The purchase was an early step in RATIONAL’s spread abroad. The group had been founded in Germany in 1973 to make and sell convection appliances, its timeline says, and it presented its first combi oven in 1976; German Wikipedia adds that from 1978 it made only combi steamers. In 1991 it set up its first foreign sales company, in the United Kingdom, and after taking over Frima it founded national sales companies across Europe, Asia and the Americas, the encyclopaedia entries say.

Inside the group, the French company first served as RATIONAL’s channel in France. When Le Journal des Entreprises profiled it in May 2010, Frima France was described as a maker of cooking appliances for professional caterers based at Wittenheim, part of the RATIONAL group, and still selling both of the group’s products in France: the SelfCooking Center combi oven, which RATIONAL’s timeline dates to 2004, and an appliance of Frima’s own.

The VarioCookingCenter.

Frima’s place in the trade rests on that appliance. RATIONAL’s timeline credits its subsidiary FRIMA with the invention, in 2005, of what it calls the world’s first VarioCookingCenter. Frima France’s managing director, Philippe Appel, told Le Journal des Entreprises in May 2010 that the product had been launched that year as a complement to the SelfCooking Center. The paper described it as an intelligent multifunction cooking appliance produced at Wittenheim; in a later article, in 2019, it called it a multifunction tilting pan that can poach, sauté and fry.

In 2010 the group changed how the two appliances were sold in France. After a trial in Germany, Le Journal des Entreprises reported, RATIONAL decided to separate their distribution, and from 1 July 2010 the French company was divided in two: Frima France, selling only the VarioCooking Center, and Frima Rational France, selling the SelfCooking Center. Appel said the business was aiming first at the European market, and that it had already set up subsidiaries in England and Spain, with a third being formed in Italy.

The reach widened over the following decade. In its March 2019 article, Le Journal des Entreprises wrote that the appliance had been exported mainly within Europe in the 2010s but was by then sold in some fifty countries on every continent, among them China, Australia, Japan and South Africa, and that it was the fastest-growing product in the group. The paper put the French company’s workforce at 200 people and said it was looking to recruit around thirty a year.

The appliance has kept its link to the Alsace plant. A news report published by FCSI in the United Kingdom in May 2026 said the iVario Pro and its predecessor models had been developed and produced at Wittenheim for more than twenty years, and that output had risen from around 500 cooking systems in 2005 to more than 10,000 by 2025. The same report described Wittenheim as the group’s centre of expertise for contact-heating technology, while its combi ovens are made at the main site in southern Germany.

Fryers, ranges and suites.

Commercial fryer and range makers sell to people who rarely see their products in a showroom. Their buyers are chain operators, dealers and kitchen consultants, and the brands present themselves in the language of the cooking line: the fry station of a quick-service restaurant, a bank of vats with baskets hung above them, and the oil filtration tucked into the cabinet below.

Range and modular-suite makers work at a different scale. Their pictures show hotel and restaurant kitchens laid out as one continuous run of cooking blocks, with burners, solid tops, griddles and fryers set into a single stainless line, and close-ups of the working parts: a flame ring under a pan, the plate of a griddle, a row of control knobs. Much of the trade’s visual record is technical rather than glamorous: specification sheets, catalogue line drawings, cut-away diagrams of heating tubes, and drawing files that kitchen designers drop into their plans.

The industry also meets at its own fairs. HostMilano in Italy and, in the United States, the NAFEM Show and the National Restaurant Association Show are among the events that trade titles such as Foodservice Equipment Reports cover each year in their show reports. Many of the brands in this guide now belong to a few large groups, among them Middleby and Ali Group, which completed its purchase of Welbilt in 2022.

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 brand instead of two.

The Frima name was retired in February 2018. Le Journal des Entreprises reported in March 2019 that the group had decided to drop Frima, the brand under which the VarioCookingCenter was sold, and to use only the RATIONAL brand, because, Rational France’s managing director Veith Adelmann said, RATIONAL was better known around the world and a single brand gave more visibility. The paper noted that the change was more delicate in France, where the Frima brand was well known. RATIONAL’s timeline records the same step as “FRIMA becomes RATIONAL,” and the English and French Wikipedia entries date it to 2018. The company’s own name followed on 1 January 2019, when Frima, part of the group since 1992, became Rational France, the paper reported.

The product has carried on under the new name. RATIONAL’s timeline gives 2020 for the introduction of its iCombi Pro and iVario cooking systems, and the 2019 article said the group planned to enlarge the Wittenheim site several times over on land close to the existing plant. On 5 May 2026, the FCSI report said, RATIONAL opened an extension there, named the “RATIONAL iVario Business Centre,” which doubled the production area and added a customer centre with three training kitchens. The report said Wittenheim is also home to the head office of RATIONAL’s French sales company and that around 270 people from 11 countries work at the site.

For a design guide, Frima shows how a well-known national brand can be folded into its parent’s name when a group wants one identity worldwide. Compare RATIONAL, the parent that absorbed it, and Electrolux Professional, another professional kitchen-equipment group. For this guide we use a slate blue, a brick red and steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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