Josper Brand Guidelines: The 1969 Charcoal Oven Named for Josep and Pere

A restaurant, a metalworker and an idea about indoor grilling.

Josper comes from Pineda de Mar, a coastal town in the province of Barcelona. The company says it was born in 1969, created by Pere Juli and Josep Armangué, and that the brand name joins their two names, Josep and Pere. Trade reporting is consistent with that date: Foodservice Equipment Reports described Josper as a 49-year-old company in April 2018.

The company tells its origin as a kitchen problem. In its account, Juli and Armangué wanted to grill indoors, at the highest possible temperature, in their restaurant Mas Pi in Pineda de Mar. Their answer was a closed box burning charcoal, with one air opening at the bottom to let air in and one at the top to let smoke and combustion gases out, and a central door so a cook could turn and watch the food without losing the aromas. Josper calls the result the first charcoal oven, and describes it as a grill and an oven in a single piece of equipment.

Josper also says the design was protected early. In a November 2017 news post, the company wrote that the oven’s design and its system for controlling charcoal temperature through vents earned the first international patent for charcoal ovens from the European Patent Office. That is the company’s own account, and the post did not give the patent date.

For most of its history Josper was run by its founding families. The company describes the business as a family project, and in 2017 Pere Juli, then its chief executive, accepted an award on its behalf. A second generation later took over: Josper says Sandra Juli became chief executive and Manu Yebras chief operating officer, leading an expansion that it says took the ovens to more than 120 countries.

Ovens, grills and a restaurant brand.

The core of the range is still the charcoal oven. Josper’s current catalogue lists two oven families, the HJX Pro and the HJA-PLUS, each in Mini, Small, Medium and Large sizes (sold as Mini, S80, M120 and L175), alongside charcoal grills, accessories and high-temperature cookware. Josper explains the category on its own pages as a Spanish invention that made it possible to have closed charcoal grills inside restaurant kitchens, and even in homes, without the room filling with smoke. It says it now has more than 40,000 clients; in 2017 it gave a figure of more than 30,000 end customers in over 122 countries. In 2017 the company also said its range had grown from the first HJX oven, in four sizes, to a portfolio of more than twenty charcoal units.

Josper sells to both professional and home cooks. The Middleby Corporation, announcing its purchase of the company in 2018, described Josper as a manufacturer of charcoal grill and oven cooking equipment for commercial foodservice and residential applications. The company’s own pages address chefs and the hospitality trade first, and say it always uses charcoal from good wood.

The brand has also run its own dining rooms. In its 2017 post the company said it had built a restaurant brand and franchise, Pura Brasa, a grill restaurant chain with more than seven sites at the time.

In November 2017 Josper won the ASTER award for SME business trajectory at the 35th edition of the awards run by ESIC Business School, presented at the National Theatre of Catalonia and shared that year with Torrons Vicens, according to the company’s account of the evening.

How oven makers present themselves.

Commercial ovens are bought by chefs, restaurant chains and kitchen designers rather than by shoppers, and their makers present them that way. Catalogues and websites lean on stainless steel product shots against plain backgrounds, close-ups of touch-screen control panels, and oven fronts photographed in working restaurant, bakery and convenience-store kitchens, often with a chef at the door.

The category covers several kinds of machine. Combi steamers join convection heat and steam in one cabinet; speed ovens pair fast-moving hot air with other sources of heat; conveyor and deck ovens serve pizza and baking; and charcoal ovens put live fire inside a closed box. Many makers sell more than one kind, and several of these names now sit inside larger equipment groups, Middleby of Elgin, Illinois, among them, rather than standing alone.

Much of the selling happens face to face. HostMilano in Milan, Internorga in Hamburg and the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago are among the fairs where makers show new ovens, often with chefs cooking on the stand. Alto-Shaam says it first showed its Cook & Hold oven at the 1968 NRA Show, and the makers’ own websites still point buyers to test kitchens and live cooking demonstrations, where an oven can be judged by what comes out of it. TurboChef’s website offers a way to find one of its test kitchens, and Alto-Shaam’s lists demonstrations and virtual events under the name Taste of Alto-Shaam.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and where its ovens are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Catalan family firm inside an American group.

Josper stopped being independent in 2018. On 20 April that year The Middleby Corporation, the foodservice equipment group based in Elgin, Illinois, announced that it had acquired Josper S.A., based in Pineda de Mar near Barcelona. Foodservice Equipment Reports noted that the terms were not disclosed and that Josper was Middleby’s third acquisition of 2018, after JoeTap and the Italian steam-cooking maker Firex; FE&S reported the deal in similar terms. Middleby’s chief executive at the time described charcoal cooking as a growing trend in the United States and globally.

The Catalan base did not move with the sale. Middleby’s release placed the company in Pineda de Mar, and Josper continues to present the town as its home and the setting of its origin story.

Leadership has since changed. In a post dated 30 June 2025 the company announced that Sandra Juli and Manu Yebras were leaving its management, and welcomed Bakri Bouchi as the new chief executive, with a renewed management team. The same post described Josper as a family business by origin and spirit, now inside a larger group.

The brand’s design story is the oven itself: a closed charcoal box with a central door and air openings at the bottom and top, as the company describes it. Its line “grilling over charcoal as a way of life” heads the company’s own history page, and its site now offers a book on the Josper story with recipes for cooking over embers.

For a design guide, Josper shows how a single, clearly explained invention and a founders’ name can carry a brand for more than half a century. Compare Mibrasa, another Spanish maker of charcoal ovens, and TurboChef, a fellow Middleby brand. For this guide we use charcoal, ember and ash tones with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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