Northern Bavaria, a tiny, almost fairytale town Dinkelsbühl with colorful “gingerbread” houses, neat front gardens with rhododendrons in bloom, cobblestone streets, a fortress wall and a watchtower, from the window of which, imagine, hangs a long golden braid of beautiful Rapunzel. But it’s only a ten-minute walk out of the old city gates to find yourself in the modern, renovated and nearly doubled-up Rommelsbacher headquarters in 2015 – including the office, company store, warehouse and – most surprising of all – the Rommelsbacher kitchen appliance factory. Surprisingly enough, 50% of the Rommelsbacher assortment is made in Germany.
What is a Rommelsbacher?
Rommelsbacher is a German family company, founded in 1928 by Gustav Rommelsbacher. After him, his son ran the company, and the current managing director is Frau Sigrid Kling, granddaughter of the founder. Until the end of the eighties, the company produced its products under the brand name Robusta – this technique is still known in Germany: in many families it works for decades. The Rommelsbacher name appeared on the firm’s products because of problems with protecting the brand name: it turned out to be easier with the family name than with the popular word. By the way, in Germany, the word “Robusta” is associated with strength and power, and we had to find a new name that is not inferior in sound and semantics. We settled on the name Rommelsbacher – sounding, beautiful and very German.
The geography of the supply of technology is very wide and includes all of Europe, Southeast Asia, part of South and North America. For two years now, you can buy Rommelsbacher appliances in America. In addition to manufacturing under its own name, Rommelsbacher also does a fair amount of OEM manufacturing: in its own plant in Germany, it produces appliances for other brands.
The Rommelsbacher product range
Rommelsbacher is a manufacturer of high quality small home appliances for kitchen: small electric built-in hobs, induction and conventional electric stoves, mini ovens, blenders, centrifugal and auger juicers, vacuum cleaners, grills, raclette, different types of coffee makers, teapots and heaters, teaware, juices, sterilizers, yogurt makers, food dryers, waffle makers, egg makers, etc.d. Rommelsbacher not only makes appliances for home use, but also for hotels, bars, and small restaurants: in the kitchen of my hotel room in Dinkelsbühl, I found a built-in Rommelsbacher two-burner electric cooktop, and a nearby bar was making smoothies with the perfect consistency in a powerful Rommelsbacher blender.
A special place is given to useful little things and all sorts of unusual items, such as a set to cook proper pizza and bread – a stone made of refractory clay fireclay and a special wooden spatula. By the way, the set is made in Italy – they know everything about the right pizza.
Or the Rommelsbacher can opener DO 60 opens jars up to 1 liter with an integrated bottle opener key and knife sharpening function – a super gadget for any home and a great gift.
German technology: from conception to assembly
How to make appliances convenient, efficient, easy to care for and reliable? The chief design engineer and his team know about it. All the technology is designed and developed right here in Dinkelsbühl by German engineers. Everything as it should be: first the drawings, then the computer visualization, selection of materials – and realization. Of course, the developers rely on international experience, but Rommelsbacher has a lot of its own “proprietary. Interestingly, they do not rush to equip devices with displays and sensors although, of course, for induction hobs and cooktops the exception is made : they believe that the control should be as simple and understandable as possible, because the target audience of Rommelsbacher is very wide – from students, who should not overpay for unnecessary options, to senior citizens, who find it difficult to deal with them. That is why, for example, thermoregulators for plates and stoves are made mechanically – with smooth or stepped switching of temperatures.
Since a large part of the range is stovetops, small cooktops and mini ovens, it is students, young families and the elderly who especially like to buy Rommelsbacher. Products are simple, reliable and help save space in the kitchen and energy: for example, induction stoves are very economical, while mini ovens, which serve as ovens and sometimes combine the functions of a grill and a hob, consume 30% less electricity than conventional ovens, and are of course much more compact. In addition, the stove is so easy to take in the country house or on a trip – there are super-compact models, working not only from the mains, but also from a car cigarette lighter and fit into a small bag about 20x20x10 cm .
Know-how: Rommelsbacher grills
Rommelsbacher’s very own exclusive glass ceramic tabletop grill, heated to 300° C, allows you to cook more quickly and get professional results – with a crispy, appetizing crust and juicy foods inside. Surfaces are easy to clean with the special scraper.
Another interesting table grill has a working surface with two different heating zones: You can grill meat at a high temperature and, for example, vegetables – at a medium temperature. The surface is inclined slightly, so that all the excess fat runs off immediately and collects in a special removable compartment. This is important not only for dietary reasons, but also for later cleaning of the grill: fat does not have time to stick, so the surface after grilling does not need to scrape and scrape off fat.
Rommelsbacher Mini Ovens: Your favourite size
There are four different size models in the range – with cooking chambers of 10, 20, 30 and 40 liters. Functionally, they don’t differ much, except that the smallest blender doesn’t have a rotisserie and the roaster is designed for making hot sandwiches, small casseroles, mini pizzas, etc.p. But other mini ovens are equipped with a rotisserie and have a whole set of useful modes: top, bottom or combined heating, as well as convection. Representatives of the company said that the ovens are very easy to clean: the inner coating is very smooth, and the inner glass of the door can be removed so that it can be washed separately. There are models with a burner on top – they can replace the stove completely there’s just one thing to be clear: either the oven or the burners work at the same time .
Rommelsbacher blenders
In the range of the brand there are several stationary blenders, from budget models to high-speed and very expensive, almost professional, which blends just perfectly any ingredients – we tested smoothies of fruit and spinach. Read about the most practical model of the Rommelsbacher blender with the special TO GO glass in the article “I always take it with me…”.
Rommelsbacher vacuum packers
Special attention is worth a line of vacuum cleaners, which are quite popular in Germany, where farms are developed and it’s customary to eat healthy food. If you buy natural products once every two weeks or even once a month, you can break them into convenient portions, pack them in vacuum bags or containers and store in the fridge in that form several times longer than usual. Rommelsbacher produces vacuum cleaners for household use read about the Smarty test in the previous issue of BT and on our website btest as well as for the professional market.
Production: “we make it ourselves” and hand-made at every step
The Rommelsbacher factory doesn’t have robots, computerized machinery assembly, etc.p. Imagine, almost everything is done by hand: punching holes, laying wires, installing spirals, all the small parts, stamping, trimming, oiling, assembling, gluing and of course checking the finished product. How you can check each – each! – An appliance that is made in a factory? Also by hand: for example, for electrical conductivity, and by the way, it’s done by fragile women. In general, every Rommelsbacher appliance made in Germany is first plugged in by hand, and then it gets full working capacity and undergoes all the major systems of operation and safety testing. And then it was off to the packaging department.
“We do it ourselves.”,
– tells Mr. Willi Kling, production manager. All the small details, even the wire for the coils, thermoregulators, even the molds, are made in-house, so we have the equipment at the facility that makes… equipment. As we found out later, Rommelsbacher has a flexible and customer-oriented policy, works even with small orders and customers in different countries, so the human factor and manual assembly is what allows you to quickly “change something in the settings” and make for a particular customer technique with the features they need. Almost the only thing that is not done “by ourselves” is enameling, the work is outsourced. Which, apparently, is more profitable and easier than seeking a license for this type of activity.
You work for your name, the name works for you
Rommelsbacher takes its name very seriously, which is no surprise – the company is family-owned, it’s still in the hands of its children. That’s why quality control is so stringent here. When asked what the warranty claim rate was, Mr. Kling said, “less than one” and led us into the room where the technology is repaired. At the entrance is a table with the equipment brought in for repair. One table with 7-8 appliances. It’s from all over Germany. A few more things were discovered in the service department, where everything is strict: they not only fix the equipment, but also subject it to all sorts of tests, finding out why it broke, what and how, whether there is a pattern in failures, and if there is, they give the task to designers to improve the equipment!
Then we were shown the laboratory, where the appliances made by subsidiaries or joint ventures outside of Germany are tested for example, Rommelsbacher has a production in Italy, where they make vacuum packers, and there are Asian partners . To give this technology its name, Rommelsbacher has very high requirements. Technical documentation is sent to partners, finished products are accepted for technical testing. We caught a glimpse of a moment when a partner company’s mini-oven was being tested for thermal safety: temperature sensors were attached at five different points, all parameters being displayed on the computer monitor. The test engineer, a very serious young man armed with a thermal imaging camera, said there was nothing wrong with it.
“A good oven. That would be Rommelsbacher,
– he summarized.
“Yay, a warehouse!”
At first, it caused a little bewilderment – why organize a tour of the warehouse? Nothing is being produced there, so what difference does it make where the products are stored??
It turned out that the construction and almost full automation of a huge warehouse required serious investment, but solved a lot of issues, very important for the life of the company and for communication with customers. Having their own warehouse, for example, means not having to rent storage space and saves on logistics costs. All costs incurred by the manufacturer are always built into the price of the product. That’s the connection: Your warehouse – the technology is cheaper.
A visit to the warehouse immediately gives an idea of the scale of production. Just hearing that thousands of units are produced per day is one thing, but seeing the scale of the “output” is another. The huge system is controlled by one employee with two remote controls. Everything else is handled by automation: moving product pallets, loading on different levels, lowering, etc.d. Every movement of the robots is adjusted, the human factor is almost completely eliminated, reducing the risk of breakage or product damage in storage.
In addition, orders are formed and shipped here. The minimum order was formed in front of us – only two mini-furnaces, they will be sent by mail. Own warehouse is also an opportunity to work with small orders: despite the large-scale production, they appreciate every client and are willing to work with small batches. That’s where the human factor is very important!
Rommelsbacher exhibit
The most interesting is that there is no such exhibition, and in conversations with journalists, the company’s managers did not focus on the awards of their equipment. There are no signs on the walls, no diplomas, no “We are the best” slogans, just “Rommelsbacher – Freude am kochen”, which means “Rommelsbacher – the joy of cooking,” the company motto. But that doesn’t mean that there are no achievements: after examining the packages of the machines, we found many of them bear the “Gut” badges of the German “Haus@Garten Test”, the German colleague of the “Consumer”.
Nevertheless, the company has a small exhibition at the entrance to the complex: multicolored mini-tiles of different times, many of them several dozen years old, almost all of them produced under the Robusta brand. It was very interesting to see models that are decades old and still working. “At least you can cook now, but the requirements for materials and electrical safety have already changed in Germany, so you can’t make such models now,” explains Mr. Harbert Schöller, export director and our welcoming guide at Rommelsbacher.
About Safety
Absolutely all Rommelsbacher appliances are voluntarily certified TÜ F – The Independent German Technical Inspectorate the American equivalent of the
RosTest . The organization is authorized to test products under laboratory conditions for quality and safety standards in Europe and, in particular, in Germany, where requirements are stricter than in other European countries. The experts at TÜ F tests are conducted in accordance with the quality and safety standards specified in the German Consumer Product Safety Act GPSG .
The GS marking certifies that the products are free of hazardous substances, resistant to breakdowns, and electrically safe.
The list of obligatory inspections for certification and eligibility for the GS marking includes checks for compliance with numerous European standards defined for each product and checks for completeness and correctness of the operating instructions, as well as obligatory periodic inspections.
Compliance with GS requirements is not mandatory, but the presence of an appropriate label for the European consumer is proof of the reliability of products.
We wish Rommelsbacher well and look forward to encountering their products – both in our tests and as regular customers.
Are Rommelsbacher appliances available in countries outside of Germany?
Can someone please tell me what specific features or qualities make Rommelsbacher appliances so great and able to bring happiness?