TREIF Brand Guidelines: The Oberlahr Cutting Name With a Diamond Logo Dating to 1948

Bone saws, grindstones and a family firm.

TREIF has two start dates. JBT Marel, which now holds the name, says TREIF was founded in 1948 and began with grindstones. An interview in the German business magazine Wirtschaftsforum adds detail: Daniel Allendorf, then head of operations and development, said TREIF Maschinenbau GmbH was founded in 1968 by Toni Reifenhäuser, while the firm’s roots, and the origin of its diamond-shaped logo, go back to 1948, when the work consisted of building bone saws and grindstones. This guide uses 1948 for the roots and 1968 for the limited company.

Dicers and strip cutters came later, Allendorf said. JBT Marel says the business has been based in Oberlahr, in the west of Germany, since 1976. In 1989 the founder’s son, Uwe Reifenhäuser, took over, and Allendorf credited him with driving the company’s industrialisation and international expansion.

By the time of that interview, TREIF was active in 105 countries, with subsidiaries in France, England, Italy, the United States and China, and Allendorf named the United States as its largest growth market of recent years. He described a customer base that ran from the neighbourhood baker to large names in food processing, and said it had grown first around the home site before other geographic markets followed.

The family era ended in 2020. On 4 September that year the trade titles Fleischwirtschaft and Meat Management reported that Marel, the Icelandic food processing equipment group, had agreed to buy the entire share capital of TREIF Maschinenbau, including all relevant business activities of the group. Fleischwirtschaft named Uwe Reifenhäuser as the current owner and chief executive. Allendorf said the sale took place that October.

Dicing, slicing, portion cutting and bread.

TREIF’s range covers four kinds of cutting, as JBT Marel lists them: slicing, dicing, portion cutting and bread cutting. Allendorf described it in 2021 as running from very small machines for the neighbourhood bakery to large industrial machines with robotics, most of them standard models, with a configurator that lets a customer choose options.

At the small end sits the FELIX dicer, which Allendorf called the company’s best seller in the smaller segment and said was owned by nearly every butcher in Germany. At the other end is the FALCON evolution portion cutter, which he described as a fully automatic line solution. The interview’s photographs show a FALCON robot line made up of a preformer, the cutter, a scale and a robot. Allendorf said TREIF had offered robot-loaded lines for almost ten years by then.

JBT Marel’s catalogue today gives each range a defined job. The PUMA cuts bone-in and boneless raw material from fresh or at temperatures as low as –4°C. The LION and LION bacon models cut bone-in and boneless product with no pre-cut. The HAWK is described as an entry-model portion cutter for butcheries and cheese processors. The DIVIDER family runs from startUp, an entry-level slicer for canteens, commercial kitchens and butcheries, to lineUp, a medium-capacity model.

Bread has its own line of machines, including the tabletop SIRIUS+ and the EAZY, which JBT Marel pitches at bakeries, supermarkets and cafeterias. The company also says TREIF pioneered oil-free bread cutting.

Blades are the other half of the story. JBT Marel says TREIF develops and manufactures machine and blade as one unit, and that its patented nanoBlade is produced in-house from steel and it also describes a grinding and sharpening service. Allendorf made a related point about flexibility in 2021: in basic concept, he said, it makes little difference whether meat or vegetables are being cut, so TREIF built machines that can switch between products with simple conversions. He also described raw pieces being scanned by 4-D cameras and weighed before they are cut to weight.

Steel, belts and trade fairs.

Makers of food processing machinery tend to show the work itself. Stainless lines are photographed under cool light, fillets move along white belts, sausage ropes curve out of a filler, slicers fan portions onto a conveyor, and fryers and seasoning drums turn snacks in close-up. The BBC opened a 2017 report on Marel in just that way, with cod on a conveyor and a machine cutting each fillet into portions.

Steel carries much of the imagery. Wash-down surfaces, welded seams and the curve of a hopper recur in close-up, and the machines are shown at close range.

Test kitchens and technology centres are the sector’s showrooms. JBT Marel lists Customer Technology Centers on several continents where customers can run their own product through the equipment, and Handtmann describes its Forum in Biberach as a technology and customer centre. Websites often follow the customer’s food rather than the machine: JBT Marel sorts its site by poultry, meat, seafood, prepared foods and beverages, and Handtmann’s regional sites by meat and sausage, baked goods, pet food and dairy.

The trade fairs set the calendar. IFFA in Frankfurt, SÜDPACK in Friedrichshafen, Anuga FoodTec in Cologne, Seafood Processing Global in Barcelona and PACK EXPO in the United States are regular venues for the sector, alongside bakery and ingredient shows: vegconomist reported that Handtmann took new bakery processes to iba in 2025, and JBT Marel’s news page reported on CibusTec in 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker: who founded it, who owns it, and where its machines are made, marking clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A family diamond inside a larger group.

Marel’s chief executive at the time, Árni Oddur Thordarson, called TREIF “a true hidden champion in our industry” when the deal was announced, Meat Management reported. He said TREIF’s largest segments were meat and baked goods, and that Marel believed its technical capabilities could be carried across to Marel’s poultry and fish businesses. In the 2021 interview Allendorf said TREIF was working closely with its new parent, and that it planned to use the group’s purchasing and sales strength to enter new markets.

A second change followed. John Bean Technologies completed its acquisition of Marel on 2 January 2025 and renamed itself JBT Marel Corporation, according to the company’s annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That took TREIF into the combined group.

The name survives, but its standing has changed. JBT Marel’s page now states that “TREIF is a JBT Marel product line” and calls the name a “proud legacy” that is part of the group. The treif.com address forwards to that page, which lists JBT Marel in Oberlahr, under the legal name Marel TREIF GmbH, and a TREIF USA office in Shelton, Connecticut. Machines in the catalogue keep the TREIF prefix, and JBT Marel says the blades are still made in-house. It also lists an ISO 50001 energy management certificate among the site’s documents.

The clearest identity fact comes from Allendorf: the diamond-shaped TREIF logo can be traced back to 1948. The brand’s own spelling is in capitals, though trade titles such as Fleischwirtschaft have written Treif.

For a design guide, TREIF shows how a family maker’s name can outlast its independence when it stays attached to specific machines, and how a set of model names does much of the identity work: FALCON, PUMA, LION and HAWK all sit under the same prefix. Compare JBT Marel, the group that now holds the name, and Bizerba, the Balingen scale maker. For this guide we use a dark blue and blade grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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