Rademaker Brand Guidelines: A Soest Garage, Culemborg and the Laminated Dough Line

Two employees, then Culemborg.

Rademaker began in 1977 in a garage in Soest, in the Netherlands. The company’s own timeline says it started with two employees as a family business, and that its core business from the first day was tailor-made industrial solutions for bakeries. Rademaker BV was established in 1980. In 1981 the company moved to Culemborg, the Gelderland town just south of the Lek river, opening a production facility of 1,000 square metres.

Its offices abroad followed quickly, by that same timeline: the UK in 1983, the USA in 1984 and France in 1986, then Germany in 1996, China in 2007 and Italy in 2009. By 1996, it says, production and offices had grown to 15,000 square metres of floor space. In 2002 it opened Rademaker Slovakia, a production facility of 3,600 square metres, and it records an expansion of that site in 2014. Further expansions of the Culemborg headquarters and Technology Centre are listed for 2013 and 2018.

Rademaker describes itself today as a family-owned business, with headquarters in Culemborg and sales offices across Europe, the United States and China. The trade magazine World Bakers reported in January 2018 that the company’s owner, Jeroen van Blokland, was handing operational management to two directors, Gerard Muermans and Roland Kals, who became CEOs of Rademaker and its subsidiaries and executive members of the board of the holding company, Racu BV. Van Blokland stayed on as chairman of Racu’s board, the magazine said, focusing on business development and real-estate projects. World Bakers was still naming Muermans and Kals as CEOs in April 2024.

Dough sheets, layers and two ranges.

Rademaker’s subject is dough that arrives as a continuous sheet. Its website explains lamination as a traditional process in which fat is enclosed in dough, then repeatedly folded and rolled thin; its laminators bring that process into the factory, feeding a pastry make-up line or a croissant line. Other sections of the line make the dough blocks and reduce them, step by step, to the thickness a product needs.

The range is split in two. Rademaker is the industrial platform, which the company’s menu lists for more than 500 kilograms of dough an hour; Radini is the compact one, listed for less than 1,200 kilograms an hour, so the two overlap. Radini is presented as modular: a bakery can start with the level of automation it needs and add units later, and can combine automated steps with manual ones such as adding a filling or decorating. The company’s product pages run from croissants and laminated pastry to bread and buns, flatbread, pizza, pies and quiches, doughnuts and pinsa. It also sells bakery robotics, and says every gripper is designed and built in-house.

Testing is central to how it sells these lines. The company’s timeline dates its first Rademaker Technology Centre to 2006, with 1,000 square metres of floor space, and records a new centre opening in the Netherlands in 2021, as well as a Technology Centre in China in 2016. The centre in Culemborg is staffed by technologists and test bakers, who start from a document setting out a customer’s product and its requirements. World Bakers reported on the opening of a new R&D Center in Culemborg on 18 September 2017, with tours of the production halls and a demonstration by the Dutch Boulangerie Team in the test bakery.

In the United States, where Rademaker says it has installed more than 200 production lines across North America, the company is based in Hudson, Ohio. World Bakers reported that its Rademaker Experience Center would open on 14 June 2024 in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, near Chicago O’Hare airport, with Radini lines, mixers, ovens, a proofer and freezers for end-to-end product testing.

Dough, steel and test bakeries.

Bakery equipment makers sell machines, but what they show is mostly dough. The picture language of the trade is familiar: dough sheets gliding along white belts, laminated croissant lines, rack ovens opening on golden trays, deck ovens with stone soles, and flour-dusted hands beside stainless machines.

The test bakery is part of that presentation. Rademaker invites customers to its Technology Centre in Culemborg to try their products with its technologists and test bakers, and it runs an Experience Centre near Chicago; Sveba Dahlen says its Bakery Innovation Centers let distributors and customers test its machines using their own recipes and ingredients, with master bakers on hand. In both cases the offer is to see a recipe run on the machine.

The calendar runs on trade fairs, and that is where the machines are seen working. iba, held in Düsseldorf in 2025, returns to Munich from 24 to 28 October 2027, its organiser says. At the 2025 show, World Bakers reported, a Glimek bread line was to be demonstrated live with dough several times a day. Sigep World meets in Rimini in January 2027, IBIE in Las Vegas in September 2028, and südback at Messe Stuttgart. Sirha Bake & Snack, where the old Europain web address now leads, is next in Paris in January 2028.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its machines are made. Company statements are given as company statements. Where a maker publishes no brand colours or typefaces, the palette and type here are our own interpretation.

Affordable food for a growing world.

Rademaker’s most recent deal is Danish. In October 2023 World Bakers reported that it had become the exclusive representative of Form & Frys Maskinteknik, a Danish maker of folding, forming and filling machinery, in markets including Germany, France, the UK, the United States and Canada. In May 2025 the magazine reported that Rademaker had acquired the company, effective 10 April 2025, and that Form & Frys would continue to operate independently under its current management in Denmark. Milling Middle East & Africa reported the same deal. At the same time Rademaker became a minority shareholder in Sensure, an Italian maker of vision inspection systems, and planned to show one at the infeed of the Rademaker Robot at the iba 2025 trade fair.

Its website footer carries a one-line statement of purpose: “Providing solutions to produce affordable food for the growing world population.” Its partnerships page lists two relationships. Since 2017 it has worked with a women’s team at a bakery in Rwanda; World Bakers reported that partnership with The Women’s Bakery in September 2017. Since 2016 it has been a partner of the Dutch Boulangerie Team, the Dutch association for artisanal bakeries, supporting it through its Technology Centre and by sponsoring bakery competitions.

The voice is mostly that of an engineering company, with one exception worth noting: its “page not found” message says the page has “taken a bread break” and decided to “loaf around elsewhere.”

For a design guide, Rademaker shows how a machine builder can make dough, rather than steel, the subject of its story. Compare Kaak, another Dutch maker of bakery lines, and Rondo, the Swiss maker from Burgdorf. For this guide we use a navy, a butter yellow and a belt white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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