Frymaster Brand Guidelines: A Shreveport Garage Fryer Maker Since 1935

A barbecue man’s fryer in Shreveport.

Frymaster began in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1935. Its founder, P.F. Ratcliff, was then running a family business, Ratcliff Barbecue and Market, and tinkering in his two-car garage, according to the company history in Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories. There he built his first fryer around an open frypot and a jet burner, a design that did away with the visible heat exchangers that made pots hard to clean. The company’s own timeline dates its first jet burner to 1938 and says the Frymaster name first appeared in 1940, chosen for its familiar sound; the business formally became The Frymaster Corporation in 1948.

Growth was slow. Gale’s history says Ratcliff carried his fryers to customers in the trunk of an old Ford coupe, moved out of the garage into a storefront on Marshall Street in 1939 and hired two men with no previous shop experience. He also worked with a Shreveport doughnut bakery on glazing machines and proofing boxes; by 1953 doughnut equipment made up about a fifth of sales, and the company dropped that line in the late 1960s to concentrate on fryers.

The war years brought shortages rather than new products. In 1942 Frymaster had to obtain a ruling from the War Production Board that its fryers were not heating appliances, a category then under a wartime manufacturing moratorium, Gale’s history says; a slab for a new plant was poured that year, but the building was not finished until the war ended, and both materials and labour were scarce. In 1953, the same history says, Frymaster ranked last in size and sales among 29 American fryer makers. Ratcliff hired the company’s first engineer, L. Frank Moore, that year, and in 1955 sold the business to Moore, the company’s accountant Hershel H. Herring and Robert L. Dunkelman, who had come from General Electric.

The chains, then the groups.

Frymaster’s growth came with the chains. Gale’s history names Kentucky Fried Chicken as its first large chain account, followed by Marriott’s, Bob’s Big Boy and Dairy Queen, and says McDonald’s joined after extensive testing of a new high-performance fryer. The company’s own timeline says Colonel Sanders chose Frymaster fryers for KFC at the 1958 National Restaurant Association show, and lists the steps that followed: a precision thermostat in 1954, automatic basket lifts in 1967, the Filter Magic cabinet filtration system in 1971, electric fryers and a microprocessor controller in 1974, and the MJH-50 high-efficiency gas fryer of 1983, which it says led to today’s H55.

Ownership changed in the 1980s. In 1982 Moore and the Welbilt Corporation formed a joint venture, Welmoore Industries, to buy four companies from the Sunbeam group, Frymaster among them; in 1984 Moore sold his interest to Welbilt; and in January 1995 Welbilt and its subsidiaries were bought by the London-based Berisford International, Gale’s history says. By October 2008 Frymaster was listed in the brand portfolio of the London-based group Enodis, whose acquisition by the Wisconsin company Manitowoc was completed that month, CSP Daily News and CStore Decisions reported.

The latest change came on 29 July 2022, when Ali Group announced that it had completed its acquisition of Welbilt, Inc.; Foodservice Equipment Reports listed Frymaster among Welbilt’s companies that day, alongside Garland, Convotherm and Merrychef. Frymaster’s own timeline records 2022 as the year it joined the Ali Group.

The range also carries a second name. Frymaster says it took the DEAN product line into its organisation in 1995. DEAN, it says, was founded in 1968 by Dean Hutchason to make flat-bottom fryers under licence from Protor in Britain, added tube-style fryers in the 1970s and was acquired by Welbilt in 1989; its operations moved to Shreveport in 2001. Gale’s history describes DEAN’s Thermo-Tube heat transfer as an entirely different approach from Frymaster’s open pot, aimed at a different part of the market.

The kitchen line.

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.

Built in Shreveport.

Shreveport remains the centre. Frymaster’s website calls it “Trusted Worldwide. Built in Shreveport” and says the company is headquartered in the city; its timeline says a fifth plant opened there in 1986 and, once expanded, became the long-standing home of its fryer production. Its quality page also refers to “global manufacturing facilities” without naming them. In September 2026 Trade & Industry Development reported that Frymaster LLC would expand in Caddo Parish into a newly acquired building next to its existing plant, adding 300,000 square feet of capacity and 113 jobs, and described the company as part of Welbilt; its president, Oscar Villa, spoke of the customers of both Frymaster and Merco.

The company dates its quality registration to 1992, under ISO 9002, and says its system is now registered to ISO 9001:2015; Gale’s history adds that Frymaster won the US Commerce Department’s “E Star” award for exporting in 1992. Its current fryers include the FilterQuick range, the H55 and the OCF series, and it sells DEAN tube fryers such as the Decathlon and SuperRunner. In August 2025 it marked 90 years with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Shreveport. Its trademarked line is “We Fit the Way You Fry.”

For a design guide, Frymaster shows how a single product, made in one Louisiana city for nine decades, can carry a brand through several changes of owner. Compare Garland, which was listed beside it among Welbilt’s companies when Ali Group completed its purchase in 2022, and Pitco, another American fryer maker that now sits inside a larger group. For this guide we use a deep navy, a fryer-steel grey and a golden amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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