Kiefel Brand Guidelines: The Freilassing Thermoforming Maker Inside the Brückner Group

A company with two founding years, and a name that split in 2009.

Kiefel has two published starting points. A press release from the Munich chamber of commerce, the IHK, dated 7 October 2021, says Paul Kiefel founded the company in 1945 in Piding and that its headquarters moved to Freilassing ten years later; the chamber was presenting a certificate for the company’s 75 years in business. Kiefel’s own timeline begins in 1955 with the founding of Paul Kiefel GmbH in Freilassing, and in March 2025 the company marked its 70th anniversary. So the same business celebrated a 75th birthday in 2021 and a 70th in 2025.

Both accounts place the company in the south-east corner of Upper Bavaria. German Wikipedia’s entry on Freilassing lists Kiefel among the town’s mid-sized industrial firms, and the IHK called it an industrial constant of the region.

Kiefel’s timeline gives the early milestones briefly. Its entry for the first period also notes an investment by the Renolit Group, and it puts the production of the first thermoforming machines in 1962. In 1995 the company founded Kiefel Technologies, Inc. in the United States, for sales, service and manufacturing.

The ownership that matters today dates from 2007, when Kiefel became part of the Brückner Group of Siegsdorf, also in Upper Bavaria, the company says. Brückner also held Kiefel Extrusion GmbH, a blown film line business. In August 2009, chemeurope reported, Brückner Technology Holding and Reifenhäuser announced that all shares in it would go to Reifenhäuser, retroactive to 1 January, with Worms as the unit’s headquarters. Brückner said it was concentrating its Kiefel division on thermoforming and welding machines for packaging, medical and automotive customers.

The Kiefel name therefore ran for a time on two businesses. The Worms operation traded as Reifenhäuser Kiefel Extrusion until the start of 2015, when it became Reifenhäuser Blown Film, PolyForm NEXT reported that January.

From polymer trays to natural fibre.

The decade after the Brückner purchase was one of acquisitions. The company opened a new technology centre and campus in Freilassing in 2012. In October 2014 Plastech reported that Kiefel had bought SWA, a Czech maker of tools and machines for vehicle parts at Stod in the Pilsen region; it later became KIEFEL Automotive s.r.o., the company says. In 2016 it added Bosch Sprang BV in the Netherlands and Mould & Matic Solutions in Austria, the second of which later became Kiefel Packaging GmbH.

Today’s website describes three application areas: packaging, medical and pharmaceutical, and refrigerators. Machines carry family names. The SPEEDFORMER line is thermoforming for polymer; CPRJ reported in July 2024 that the tilting SPEEDFORMER KTR 6.2 Speed was launched for the mass production of thermoformed cups and coffee capsules. The NATUREFORMER line forms natural fibre. The SOLUTIONPERFORMER KFS is a form-fill-seal machine for polyolefin bags of the kind used for parenteral nutrition or dialysis, CPRJ reported in August 2023. Refrigerator work covers the inner and door liners of appliances, and the company lists high-frequency and thermo-contact welding among its technologies.

Natural fibre is the newest chapter. Kiefel’s timeline dates its entry into fibre thermoforming to 2020, with the launch of the NATUREFORMER series, and it now presents polymer and fibre side by side. The company says the NATUREFORMER KFT 90 as Advanced Version won the German Packaging Award 2023, run by the Deutsches Verpackungsinstitut, in the packaging machines category, and received that award’s Gold Award at the Berlin ceremony in September 2023. Its timeline also lists a WorldStar award for the NATUREFORMER KFT 90 Speed that year.

Trade shows set the rhythm of the launches. At K 2025 in Düsseldorf, CPRJ reported, Kiefel showed the SPEEDFORMER KTR 6.2 Speed and the NATUREFORMER KFT Lab, a compact machine for fibre development work. Testing centres are the other public face of the company. It calls them Customer Innovation Centers: one for polymer at Freilassing was due for completion in the second quarter of 2025, the company said that March, and a 350-square-metre one opened in late January 2026 at the Brückner Group Asia-Pacific site in Rayong, Thailand, with a SPEEDFORMER KMD 78 Smart and a NATUREFORMER KFT Lab on the floor.

Machines at scale.

Machinery for plastics film, sheet and recycling is sold to plant owners and engineers, and its makers build their image on the machines themselves. The tallest of them is the blown-film tower, where a shining bubble of film rises several storeys before it is flattened and wound. Wide cast lines and winders offer the same kind of picture lying down: long, level and glossy, with the finished roll as the closing shot.

Close-ups supply the colour. Extruder barrels, guards and control cabinets are often finished in brand colours, which makes the livery of the line one of the few visual assets a maker fully owns. Thermoforming makers favour the end of the line, with formed trays stacking up as they leave the machine. Makers of bottles and preforms show rows of finished shapes.

Recycling has added its own set of pictures. Pellets in glass jars, shown before and after processing, turn an industrial step into something that can sit on a table at a trade stand. Bales of used film do the opposite job, showing the raw material as it arrives. Both images need careful handling, because they suggest a result that the words around them should state plainly and with a source.

The category’s main stages are its trade fairs, among them K in Düsseldorf, NPE in the United States, Plastpol in Poland and Fakuma in Germany. Stands there often feature running machinery. For a designer, this is a field where the identity has to work on a steel guard, a touch screen and a technical data sheet as well as on a web page. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and leaves the rest out.

Made by Kiefel, in a changing network.

Where Kiefel’s machines are built is changing. The company says that its machines are “manufactured in strategically important markets around the world,” and its figures list 600 employees and 18 locations; the IHK gave around 1,000 staff across the company and its subsidiaries in 2021. The phrase it uses for quality is “Made by Kiefel,” which names the maker rather than a country.

The change began in 2024. Matthias Sieverding, known as Matt, previously head of the Brückner Group’s USA platform company, became chief executive on 1 September 2024, succeeding Thomas Halletz. On 5 November Kiefel announced that it would close Micheldorf in Austria, home of Kiefel Packaging GmbH, with about 130 employees, by the end of 2025; the Austrian paper Tips reported that Sprang-Capelle in the Netherlands would be strengthened for toolmaking and Freilassing for automation. Two weeks later the company set out a strategy called “ONE Kiefel,” with an estimated 100 jobs to go at Freilassing, while saying the site would keep a central role.

A larger step followed. On 13 October 2026 Kiefel said it would develop Freilassing into a “Technology Center of Excellence,” concentrating there on product strategy, special machines, conceptual engineering, process technology and systems expertise, and moving manufacturing closer to customers outside Europe, Asia for example. It cited trade conflicts, geopolitical uncertainty and market developments, and said the plans involved cutting about a third of the jobs at Freilassing. Talks with the works council were under way, and no outcome had been published by early November 2026. The company gave no absolute number; Dr. Web reported on 14 October, citing the Passauer Neue Presse, that about 130 posts were affected. Talks with the works council were under way at the time of the announcement, and Kiefel said it would give staff next steps at the end of October. “Freilassing is the cradle of Kiefel,” Sieverding said, in our translation.

Kiefel’s website carries the line “Members of the Brückner Group.” A page there calls the group family-owned, with five business units, 3,350 employees, 21 locations and 12 countries, and Kiefel’s contact list includes staff at the group’s sites in Dover, New Hampshire, and Rayong. The headline on its about page is “Forming the future together.”

For a design guide, Kiefel shows how a machine maker’s name can carry through a change of owner, the sale of a business line and a shift in where machines are built. Compare ILLIG, another German thermoforming name, and Reifenhäuser, which took over the Kiefel extrusion business in 2009. For this guide we use mould teal, tray white and fibre kraft with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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