Since 1946
Eighty years of Swiss engineering, now for the bakery.
One company, three industries. KREA led professional paint, then textile cleaning, then food, and left each earlier business rather than compete on price when it turned into a race to the bottom. The engineering carried across every time.
1946
Founded in Oberbuchsitten, Switzerland, by Theo Krebs and Joseph Wagner. First job: a new kind of electric paint gun.
1957
Joseph Wagner leaves to build the company that still carries his name. Krebs stays with professional spraying.
1960s
The spraying know-how moves into textile, a way to lift stains from fabric with far less toxic chemical.
1974
Theo Krebs dies. KREBS Switzerland AG carries on.
Late 1990s
A founder of Wagner buys the business. The first food spray guns are built. In 1999 the food range is certified for food use by the Cantonal Laboratory of Zurich.
2012
New ownership puts the whole company behind food, on the logic that the last stage of food prep is always local.
2026 on
Several new spraying and food technologies begin rolling out, some developed with partners.
From Krebs of Switzerland to today.
The company started as Krebs, a Swiss spraying business set up by Theo Krebs. It began by making spray equipment and grew into the food-sprayer maker it is today. The products are still designed, built and tested in-house, not bought in and rebadged.
Read the paint chapter → · Read the textile chapter → · Our food OEM history →
Our mission
We look for the problems that are shared right across food preparation, starting with the bakery, and solve them with compact automated or semi automated systems that give a measurable benefit. That means less reliance on labour, more consistency, better hygiene and less training needed for a task.
How we are structured
KREA Swiss is the engineering, production and logistics at scale. Kreativity works closer to the market, with a small team, digital marketing and a modern webshop, so that feedback from real kitchens comes straight back into R&D. Kreativity is also the brand for the new semi automated systems now coming through.
Heritage, paint
Paint: the first forty years.
KREA Swiss was founded in 1946 in Oberbuchsitten, and went straight to work on a new kind of electric paint gun. For the next four decades it was the name behind professional electric paint guns, building for Bosch, Black & Decker, Ryobi, Oldfields in Australia and others. For more than ten years it was the leading professional paint sprayer maker in the world.
That was the age of buy it once and keep it. In the late 1990s it changed. Mass production in South-East Asia and China pushed prices down, paints grew thinner and more water based, and the market moved to cheap, high-volume, low-pressure systems. Most paint sprayers now are built to coat a door or a fence a few times and then be thrown away. Ours were not. Old Krebs customers still come back for a single valve ball, thirty or forty years on, and the sprayer is still working.
Rather than compete on price, KREA left paint and moved to food, where professionals still value the components, the tolerances and the engineering. The paint story may not be over. Former partners, Bosch among them, have shown interest in our battery technology, and a new spraying technology is in development.
Heritage, textile
Textile: cleaning without the toxic chemicals.
In the 1960s Krebs took its spraying know-how into the textile industry. During garment production, fabric picks up marks from everything around it, sewing-machine oil, dust, pen, even makeup. The usual fix was aggressive solvents. Krebs built a better one.
Think of a washing machine. It cleans with three things: detergent, heat and the tumble. The detergent is the chemical, the tumble is the mechanical work. Krebs leaned on the mechanical side and cut the chemical right down, using high flash-point solvents that were kinder to skin and to the environment, warm high-tenside soap, and its own spraying skill. The stain was driven through one side of the fabric and drawn out the other, then dried on the spot. As toxic solvents like trichloroethane were banned from the late 1980s, textile makers moved to this milder method quickly.
This was a core business from the 1960s to the 1990s: small handheld guns like the TEX25, still sold across Europe today, and large systems that sat at the end of a production line. The cleaning fluids were developed with the Hohenstein Institute. Customers included Dräger, Fruit of the Loom, Adidas, Nike, Olymp and Hugo Boss.
The textile business went the way of paint when garment making left Europe for Bangladesh, India and the rest of Asia, taking whole towns’ work with it. The technology did not stop. Our R&D team has a new system close to ready, a spraying technology with a lot of power and very little noise. We are taking the patent route first, so there is more to come.
The people
The people behind KREA Swiss.
KREA has had several owners since Theo Krebs. The current owner took it on from 2010, and fully from 2012, and refocused the whole business on food. Today it is run by a small team.
Christian
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Pushkar
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