Giorik Brand Guidelines: The Belluno Fryer Maker Founded by Giorgio Candiago in 1963

A fryer maker grown from a stove family.

Giorik dates from 1963. The company’s own history names its founder as Giorgio Candiago and calls the business a natural continuation of a family firm that was already making wood-burning cookers. Its company profile on the website of FCSI, the international society of foodservice consultants, places the start of that stove work just after the Second World War, and FCSI’s magazine Foodservice Consultant wrote in October 2021 that the family had been making such cookers for almost twenty years before Giorik began. The same profile says the original set-up included a partner who looked after the technical side, and that the brand name joins the first names of the two partners, Giorgio and Riccardo.

The new company was set up to make professional fryers. In the 2021 Foodservice Consultant article, the chief executive Paolo Candiago said that in 1963 Giorik was the first Italian manufacturer to produce a deep-fat fryer, and that it was also the first Italian company to make high-speed salamanders and pasta cookers. The magazine wrote that the company grew to become Europe’s leading maker of professional fryers; those are the company’s and the magazine’s words rather than an independent ranking.

In the early 1980s, the company says, Giorik added new lines: snack cooking equipment, salamanders for grilling snacks, and convection and combination ovens. In 1986 a demerger took the founder out of the company; Giorik’s history says he went on to build other businesses in the same professional-catering trade. For roughly the next twenty years, the company says, growth came mainly from selling its equipment to other firms, in Italy and abroad, which put their own brands on it.

The ownership changed again in 2008, when the owners of the time put the company up for sale. Between 2008 and 2010, according to Giorik, Paolo Candiago and Alessandro Tonelli bought the whole share capital; the company’s site gives them as president and managing director, and Foodservice Consultant reported in 2021 that the two had been the sole owners since 2010. Giorik’s website says Giorik S.p.A. is directed and coordinated by a holding company, Pacandi Srl.

Fryers, salamanders and steam.

Under its new owners Giorik rebuilt its catalogue around its own name. The company says that between 2008 and 2010 it developed the Unika 700 and Unika 900 cooking lines, with hobs that can be made to measure, and two oven ranges for small and medium kitchens: Eco’ for general cooking and Honoré for pastry. For larger kitchens, it says, the earlier Fantasteam and Fantastic ovens gave way to the Steambox line, and the salamanders gained electronic controls.

The 2021 Foodservice Consultant article set out how the oven range was then divided: MoveAir as the entry-level model, Kore for mid-sized customers and Evolution for the heavier demands of the hospitality trade. It described several named features of the combi ovens — a Symbiotic System that combines steam from a boiler with steam generated directly in the cavity, a Meteo System that monitors the climate inside the cavity, and a Steamtuner for setting the amount and character of the steam, from dry to wet — as well as a Cloud Connection for programming and monitoring the ovens remotely. Tonelli told the magazine that the company’s chefs gather feedback from other professional kitchens and work with the research and development department on new products, and that touch controls had been added about ten years earlier.

Today’s website groups the range into ovens, modular cooking and salamanders. The ovens are sold as Steambox Evolution, Kore, Minitouch and Movair, with EasyAir as a simpler convection line. The modular cooking suites come in the Unika 700 and Unika 900 lines, the plainer Lineabase 700 and 900 and the compact Gio 60, with gas, electric, glass-ceramic and induction ranges, fry tops, lava-stone grills, pasta cookers and fryers among the modules. The salamanders are the Hi Lite, Hi Plus and Hi Touch, and the site also promotes a separate Pop Speed Oven.

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.

Between Venice and Cortina.

Giorik makes its equipment in the province of Belluno, in the Veneto. According to the company profile on the FCSI site, production moved early in 2011 to a new 12,000-square-metre site at Sedico, of which 600 square metres are given to research laboratories and a demonstration kitchen where the company’s chefs run training sessions on cooking techniques. Giorik describes the location as between Venice and Cortina d’Ampezzo, a few kilometres from Belluno, and Paolo Candiago told Foodservice Consultant in 2021 that being there gives the company access to nearby firms that can supply the software and hardware it does not make itself. The company says the Sedico plant runs on certified renewable electricity bought from a regional supplier.

Giorik sells abroad through dealers and through its own companies. The 2021 article reported that it had set up Giorik US Corp in South Carolina to build the brand in North America, and that in smaller markets it works with local dealers, whom it trains because they represent the brand abroad. The company’s news pages show it at international trade fairs through 2026: EuroShop, which it says it attended for the first time; Alimentaria in Barcelona in March; and FHA Food & Hospitality Asia in Singapore in April. In October 2026 it announced a new meeting and demonstration space at its premises, the Giorik Evolution Experience.

For a design guide, Giorik shows how a name built from two first names can carry a company through a change of owners and a move from fryers to connected ovens. Compare RATIONAL, the German combi-oven maker, and Lincat, a British maker of catering equipment. For this guide we use a slate grey, steel and a deep green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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