Tuttnauer Brand Guidelines: The Israeli Autoclave Maker With Roots in a 1925 Workshop

A family workshop becomes a company.

Tuttnauer makes autoclaves — steam sterilisers — and related infection-control equipment for medical, dental, laboratory and veterinary users, and it dates its story a long way back. The company’s website heads its history “Tuttnauer since 1925” and says that in that year Aaron Tuttnauer opened a family workshop that produced steam pressure vessels. It dates the Tuttnauer company itself to 1952, when, it says, Aaron and his son Joshua founded it, and in 1962, by its account, the workshop began mass production and moved to a larger facility.

An independent account gives slightly different details. Writing in Globes, the Israeli business daily, in July 2017, Gali Weinreb said the company was founded by Zeev Tuttnauer in 1950 and was managed for many years by his son, Joshua Tuttnauer, and in more recent years by a grandson, who had developed the business in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and, Globes said, made the Tuttnauer name an international brand. Sources therefore differ on the founder’s first name and on whether the company dates from 1950 or 1952; the 1925 workshop is the company’s own date.

The family connection ran through the company’s public life as well. Globes reported that Tuttnauer floated on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 1993 and stayed listed for 16 years, until the family bought out the public shareholders in 2009; by 2017 the company was again wholly owned by the family. The paper described a conservative, family-run industrial business that had kept to its core sterilisation work after an unsuccessful attempt in 1993 to buy a chain of electrical stores in the United States.

Tuttnauer marked what it calls its 100th anniversary in 2025, the trade magazine Manufacturing Today reported in February 2026, counting from the 1925 workshop.

Autoclaves from tabletop to room size.

Tuttnauer’s range runs from small to very large. Globes wrote in 2017 that its sterilisers could range from a small unit to one the size of an entire room, able to handle the equipment of a whole hospital. The company’s website today groups its products by market: tabletop autoclaves for clinics and dental practices in Class B, Class S and N, and M and MK versions; large and medium autoclaves for hospital sterile-processing departments; a low-temperature plasma steriliser for heat-sensitive equipment; and the Tiva washer-disinfectors. For laboratories it lists benchtop autoclaves in its EL-D line, vertical ELV-D models and the T-Lab Eco, along with consumables such as biological indicators and a chamber cleaner called Chamber Brite.

The United States has long been a key market. The company says it established a US presence in 1987 and a European one in 1989, followed by India in 2005 and China in 2008, where it says it opened a production facility in 2013. The US Food and Drug Administration’s 510(k) database records that Tuttnauer USA applied in July 2003 for clearance of a pre-vacuum autoclave with a steam generator and vertical sliding door, models 4472 EP-1V and 5596 EP-1V, and that the FDA found it substantially equivalent to existing devices in August 2004.

Its main manufacturing is in Israel. Tuttnauer’s June 2025 user manual for its T-Top tabletop sterilisers states that they are made by Tuttnauer Ltd. in the Har Tuv industrial zone at Beit Shemesh. The company says it uses stainless steel and non-proprietary replacement parts, and names the FDA, ASME, ISO and CE among the standards and approvals it works to. It also says it now sells through more than 1,200 distributors in more than 150 countries; Globes noted in 2017 that it sold mainly through long-standing distributors.

Software has joined the hardware. Manufacturing Today reported that Tuttnauer launched T-Connect in 2023, a platform for clinics and laboratories that the company says provides paperless documentation and real-time device diagnostics.

Design and documentation.

Sterilisation equipment is bought by hospital engineers, infection-control teams and the managers of sterile services departments — the rooms where used surgical instruments are washed, checked, packed and sterilised before they go back to the operating theatre. The makers describe their ranges in the order of that route. Getinge calls washer-disinfectors the first step in the reprocessing flow, then moves through sterilisers to the racks and trolleys that carry sterile goods back into the hospital.

The imagery of the category is practical rather than decorative: stainless-steel chambers, sliding or hinged chamber doors set into a wall, loading trolleys, wire baskets and instrument trays folded into blue sterilisation wrap. STERIS notes that its steam sterilisers are “often referred to as autoclaves” and sorts them by how many instrument trays fit in one load; Getinge groups its range into steam sterilisers, low-temperature sterilisers, loading equipment, and trays and baskets.

Many of the larger names grew by buying other companies, so their brands are layered. STERIS still sells steam sterilisers under the AMSCO name of the American Sterilizer Company, which it bought in 1996. Getinge folded Maquet, Atrium and other acquired names into a single Getinge brand in 2017, keeping some of them as product-family names. The makers in this set are based in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Israel and China.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. MEDICA, the medical-technology fair, is held in Düsseldorf. In Dubai, the show founded in 1975 as Arab Health now runs as World Health Expo Dubai, a new name announced at its 50th edition, TradeArabia reported; its 2026 edition moved to Expo City Dubai, Gulf News reported.

From family firm to private-equity portfolio.

The family era ended in 2017. On 2 July that year Globes reported that Fortissimo Capital, an Israeli private-equity fund, had signed an agreement to acquire 100% of Tuttnauer from the family. Manufacturing Today wrote in February 2026 that the acquisition opened a period of faster global growth and that Fortissimo continues to back the company.

Growth since then has come partly through acquisitions, a change from the conservative approach Globes described in 2017. The company says it made a partial acquisition of AT-OS, an Italian maker of washer-disinfectors, in 2018; bought Prestige Medical in the United Kingdom in 2021, which Manufacturing Today described as a UK distributor; and made a partial acquisition in 2022 of E.C.S., a maker of packaging materials and chemical and biological indicators for routine sterile control. In 2024, the company says, it established a production facility in Hungary, intended, it told Manufacturing Today, to improve the logistics and delivery of spare parts and finished products.

For a design guide, Tuttnauer shows how a maker of steel pressure vessels can carry a family name and a century-long origin story through a change of ownership, keeping its surname as the brand. Compare the Matachana and Belimed guides. For this guide we use a deep pressure blue, ink and brushed steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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