Hobart Brand Guidelines: The 1897 Troy, Ohio Food-Equipment Maker Now Part of ITW

An electric-motor company in a small Ohio city.

Hobart began in Troy, Ohio, about twenty miles north of Dayton, in 1897. English Wikipedia gives its first name as the Hobart Electric Manufacturing Company and its founder as Clarence Charles Hobart; the Dayton Daily News, in a 2016 business profile, also credits C.C. Hobart with founding the kitchen-equipment company in Troy that year. The company itself dates its opening to July 20, 1897, in a 2017 anniversary note, and says the founding idea was that electric motors could take over from hand power on kitchen equipment such as coffee mills and meat grinders.

The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on the later parent Premark, says the business began as a maker of electric engines, was sold in 1904 to four investors, and produced its first kitchen appliance, an electric coffee grinder, that same year. Mixers followed. English Wikipedia says the company was reorganised in 1913 as The Hobart Manufacturing Company, formed the division that became KitchenAid in 1919, bought the Dayton Scale Company from IBM in 1934 and took the name Hobart Corporation in 1974.

The same directory credits much of the engineering to David A. Meeker, who joined in 1925, became president in 1945 and is said to have taken out about 80 patents.

The Hobart name in Troy has a second, separate line. The Dayton Daily News reported that twenty years after the founding, Hobart and his family incorporated Hobart Brothers, which went on to make welding equipment and now sits in a different part of the same parent company. The welders and the dishwashers share a name and a town, but they are different businesses.

From coffee mills to flight-type dishwashers.

Warewashing arrived in the interwar years. In its 2017 anniversary note Hobart says that from the mid-1920s through the 1940s it added commercial dishwashers, electric slicers, larger mixers, choppers, meat saws and food scales to its range, and that during the Second World War it made high-precision instruments and ordnance items for the US military. The International Directory of Company Histories says the product line grew to include KitchenAid dishwashers alongside food mixers and commercial food equipment.

Today Hobart’s own website sorts its dishwashers by the way the racks move. Undercounter machines such as the LXn series sit beneath a counter; door-type machines form the AM16 series; conveyor machines form the CL series; and flight-type machines in the FT2000 series carry ware on a continuous belt. A PWn series washes pots, pans and utensils. Its top-specification models carry the Advansys name, and the same catalogue lists mixers, slicers, food processors, scales and wrapping machines.

The company names its customers as restaurants, hotels, hospitals and long-term care, schools and universities, and grocery retailers, across the United States, Canada, Central and South America and Europe. It says its own service arm, Hobart Service, has more than 125 locations and about 1,500 factory-trained technicians in the US and Canada, and services every brand in ITW’s food-equipment family.

Hobart also says that ITW Food Equipment Group, including Hobart, was named an ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year by the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy in each year from 2008 to 2024. Those are the company’s own statements.

Washing up, industrialised.

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.

Three owners in two decades.

Hobart’s independence ended in the early 1980s. The International Directory of Company Histories says that in 1981 the company became the target of a takeover bid by Canadian Pacific Enterprises, which it refused, preferring to stay independent; doubting it could fight off later bids, it accepted an offer from Dart & Kraft instead. The new owner closed plants, four of them in Europe, and by 1986 the group’s products were sold under the Hobart, Vulcan, Stero, Foster and Wolf trademarks, with exports to more than 100 countries.

When Dart & Kraft split in 1986, Hobart went to the new Premark International, which opened for business on October 31, 1986, alongside Tupperware, Wilsonart laminates and West Bend appliances, the same directory says. English Wikipedia says KitchenAid was sold to Whirlpool that year. In September 1999 the trade site Packaging Network reported that Illinois Tool Works had agreed to acquire Premark, naming commercial food equipment as Premark’s largest segment and Hobart, Vulcan and Traulsen among its brands. English Wikipedia says Hobart became part of ITW’s Food Equipment Group in 2001.

Today Hobart describes itself as a brand of ITW Food Equipment Group LLC, a subsidiary of Illinois Tool Works, the Glenview, Illinois, company founded in 1912; its North American food-equipment brands also include Baxter, Traulsen and Vulcan. Hobart still gives Troy as its headquarters, and the Dayton Daily News described it in 2016 as the Troy-based Hobart Corp., owned by ITW. English Wikipedia lists manufacturing plants in the US, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy and the UK.

For a design guide, Hobart shows how a motor maker’s name came to cover a whole kitchen line and passed through three owners. Compare Winterhalter, a family firm that concentrated on warewashing, and MEIKO, the Offenburg dishwasher maker. For this guide we use a steel navy, brushed steel and a red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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