Weber Brand Guidelines: The Breidenbach Slicer Maker Renamed Weber Food Technology

A company that began with skinning machines.

Weber began in Breidenbach, in central Hesse, on 2 January 1981, when Günther Weber founded a company to make machinery for industrial food processing. The company’s Breidenbach page gives the first name as Weber Fleischereitechnik GmbH, and the trade paper afz – allgemeine fleischer zeitung did the same in a 40th-anniversary report in 2021; the 1981 entry in the company’s own history uses the later name, Weber Maschinenbau. Sources also differ on the size of the start: afz and German Wikipedia say two employees, while a company news item of 2011 says six.

The early product was not a slicer. According to afz, the business first concentrated on derinding and membrane skinning machines and on reconditioning used machines. The company’s history names the Skinner ASB 1000 among its first products, and says its start coincided with the early years of IFFA, the Frankfurt trade fair for the meat industry. Skinners stayed in the range: a fully automatic defatting machine, the ASD 460, followed in 2015.

Breidenbach is still the base. The company calls the original plant its headquarters and says more than 700 people work there, in a site expanded several times to 25,000 square metres. It says the plant’s main task today is integrating machines built at its other German locations into complete production lines. The business still reconditions machines, now under the line “As Good as New,” with a hall in Breidenbach set aside for overhauling used slicers and modules.

The slicer, and everything around it.

The turn came in 1986. German Wikipedia, citing the Oberhessische Presse, says Weber developed the CCS 7000, a computer-controlled slicer for cold cuts, by that year. The company says the machine took three years of development and was servo-controlled and built entirely of stainless steel. afz called the slicer the foundation of the company’s later growth.

The range then widened around the blade. In 1996 Weber opened its first foreign subsidiary, a sales and service office in Kansas City. The interleaver of 1997 took it into cheese, the company says, and an optical scale followed in 1998, adjusting portions for the holes in Swiss cheese and the fat in meat. A second factory opened at Neubrandenburg in 2000, and the company now calls it its largest production site. A third followed at Groß Nemerow in 2005, later given over to blades, which Weber has sold under its own Durablade trademark since 2012. The Pick Robot, which places portions into packs or onto sandwiches, appeared at IFFA in 2007.

Weber also added brands and partners. Textor Maschinenbau was founded at Wolfertschwenden in the Allgäu in 2011 for machines the company called “smart & easy.” In 2015 Weber took a majority of Wente/Thiedig of Braunschweig, a long-standing supplier of cameras and image processing for its slicers, and absorbed it fully in 2021.

Then came packaging. In 2017 Weber merged with a packaging machine maker, which German Wikipedia identifies as Schröder of Werther, and adopted the line “Slicing. Packaging. Weber.” A plant for packaging components followed at Werther in 2018, and in 2019 the company launched wePACK, its first thermoformer. In 2020 the wePICK and weSHUTTLE automation systems took it further into ready meals and snacks.

Design and documentation.

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 new name, and the same family.

The name changed on 1 January 2024, when Weber Maschinenbau GmbH became Weber Food Technology GmbH. The company’s announcement said the new name would make its identity “directly apparent,” and described a shift from machinery maker to solution provider. Tobias Weber told packaging journal in 2024 that the whole deserved a name doing justice to “more than mechanical engineering,” and added that “Weber remains Weber.” The same change folded the TEXTOR brand into Weber, while Wolfertschwenden stayed on as a development and production site. Since 1 January 2025 the company has operated as Weber Food Technology SE & Co. KG, a form it says better represents a globally active business.

Ownership has stayed in the family. The company says Günther Weber made his sons Tobias and Hubertus Weber co-partners in 2015 and stepped back from active business. Fleischwirtschaft reported that Tobias Weber, the eldest son, who joined in 2009, became chief executive on 1 January 2018.

Germany is central to how the brand describes itself. afz reported in 2021 that the whole range had always been made exclusively at five production sites in Germany, and that “Made in Germany” helped the company’s image. The company’s pages now name six: Breidenbach, Neubrandenburg, Groß Nemerow, Wolfertschwenden, Werther and Braunschweig. It claims an in-house manufacturing rate of 80 percent. afz counted about 1,500 employees in 2021; German Wikipedia, citing the company, gives 2,100 in 2025, and 27 sites in 22 countries.

Two market claims come with attribution. The company’s history says Manager Magazin placed it on a list of 1,000 German world market leaders in 2010, and German Wikipedia, citing the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung in 2020, reports the company’s statement that up to 80 percent of the cold cuts in German supermarkets are cut on its machines.

Design has a documented place in the record. afz listed “a hunger for design” among the company’s values, and the Weber Power Control touch interface for its slicers won a Red Dot award for communication design in 2013, with HMI Project GmbH of Würzburg credited as designer. Weber’s website is built on blues.

For a design guide, Weber shows how a family company can change its legal name and keep its short one. Compare MULTIVAC, the thermoforming packaging group from the Allgäu, and TREIF, another German maker of food-cutting machines. For this guide we use a deep blue, a sky blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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