Urschel Brand Guidelines: The Gooseberry Snipper Maker Owned by Its Employees

A patent, a shop and a crop.

Urschel began with a fruit. English Wikipedia, citing the Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, says William E. Urschel began experimental work on a gooseberry stemmer in 1907 and received his first patent for the Gooseberry Snipper in 1908. In 1910 he set up the Urschel Gooseberry Snipper Factory in Valparaiso, Indiana, a small two-storey wooden shop in an area of gooseberry farmers. The company credits his wife, Ruth, with a central part in that early business, selling tins of gooseberries door to door from a horse-drawn cart.

The market soon moved north, the company says: William saw demand in Michigan and began selling to canners, who until then had removed stems and blossom ends by hand. Several versions of the machine followed, including the Little Gem, which concealed its working parts to protect the patented design. More than 80 patents went to him, the company says, some for food machinery and others for mechanical movement and construction.

Invention remained the business for two decades. William developed a machine that cut bricks of ice cream into bars and dipped them in chocolate for the Eskimo Pie, an account given by the company and, English Wikipedia says, by The Indianapolis Star in 1997. He began selling a bean snipper in 1922 and worked on a mechanical green bean harvester; in August 1929 the Vidette-Messenger reported one going to the Fremont Canning Company in Michigan. A red beet harvester and topper followed in 1930, manufactured by the Scott Viner company as a Scott-Urschel product. At that time, English Wikipedia says, Urschel’s own premises were used for model-building and experiments while industrial producers handled production.

By 1929 the firm had become Urschel Laboratories, and the word has stayed. The company says it has kept “Laboratories” in its name because of its continuing research into cutting methods. William’s sons Joe and Gerald joined him in designing machinery and, the company says, were awarded more than 70 patents in their lifetimes. The company’s list of presidents runs from William to Joe in 1942, Robert in 1983 and, from 2013, Rick Urschel.

A history told in model letters.

Urschel’s own timeline reads as a run of model letters. In the 1930s came the Model M Slicer, which the company calls the first size-reduction machine to use centrifugal force, and the Model B Dicer, which it says transformed the canned soup industry. The 1950s brought the Model G Dicer and the Model OV Slicer, for cross-cutting long products such as pickles, carrots and celery. Meat came in the same decade: in June 1951 the Vidette-Messenger reported a new grinder that Joe Urschel had spent more than four years developing, and a sample ran at a Valparaiso meat market that sold “Urschelburgers,” according to English Wikipedia.

The 1960s added two lasting features. One was a product test cutting area, where customers could visit and see their own products cut; the company later enlarged it and began another addition in the 2020s. The other was the Model MG mill, which used a comminution cutting principle and grew into the Comitrol Processor line of milling equipment. Some names were lighter: the company says the Model GRL Strip Cutter of 1966, for corrugated or flat french fries, was named after the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee.

Later decades added new lines. The Model M Dicer was introduced for meat and poultry in the 1980s, and a cheese shredder followed; the 1990s brought the TranSlicer and QuantiCut names, the 2000s the DiversaCut 2110, and the 2010s the Affinity dicer. In the 2020s the company has added the M VersaPro Dicer and the Comitrol Processor Model 9310.

Exports and metalwork grew alongside the machines. In January 1973, English Wikipedia says, citing the Vidette-Messenger, Urschel began operating its own stainless steel casting foundry and announced a London sales and warehousing office; the company calls Urschel International Ltd. its first subsidiary office. In 1975 it received the President’s “E” Award for excellence in exporting, presented by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Today the company says it has more than 500 employees and a sales and service network across more than 130 countries.

Lines, steel and test kitchens.

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.

From a family firm to employee owners.

Urschel stayed around Valparaiso for more than a century, moving to a larger site in 1957. In 2013 it broke ground on a site of about 160 acres in nearby Chesterton, and the new headquarters opened in August 2015. Inside INdiana Business put the building at 350,000 square feet at the time. The company says later work took it past 525,000 square feet, in what it describes as the largest expansion in its history.

Ownership changed months after the move. In March 2016 Inside INdiana Business reported that the company now belonged to its 400 employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, after the family cited “the uncertainty of the ability or willingness of the fifth generation to run the business.” Rick Urschel, the chief executive, told the publication the move was not an “exit strategy.” Family Business Magazine reported that employees would receive shares each year and could sell them back to the plan when they retired. The company now describes itself as 100% employee owned since 2016, and counts four generations of the family in its history.

Leadership has since widened beyond the family. On 12 October 2026 Tim Crammer became president, the company says, with Rick Urschel remaining chief executive. Crammer came from Henny Penny, where he helped lead that company’s own move to an ESOP in 2015.

Production is documented in one place. Northwest Indiana Business Magazine reported in May 2025 that Urschel manufacturing and production in Chesterton would continue as before when it took a minority stake in KRONEN, the German maker of salad, vegetable and fruit processing technology. The two brands stay independent, and the joint announcement said Urschel would sell KRONEN machines in the United States and Mexico from July 2025 and in most of Asia from 2026. The company says it makes all critical parts under one roof. In 2026 it revived an old name with the Little Gem Aspire Dicer, which it says is named after William Urschel’s original Little Gem.

The company calls itself the global leader in food cutting technology, and that is its own description. Its website stylesheet in November 2026 uses a strong blue with a lighter blue and the Gantari typeface.

For a design guide, Urschel shows how a maker can stay with one craft, cutting, and let a model name carry a century of memory. Compare TREIF, the German slicing and dicing maker, and Heat and Control, which has presented Urschel equipment at the Propak Cape trade show. For this guide we use a cutting blue and a stainless grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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