The engineering behind sprayers you already know.

How KREA came to build for the food trade.

In the 1990s a founder of Wagner, the German DIY giant, bought the Krebs business to build on its spraying strength. Wagner is a B2C company. Walk into any German DIY store and the shelves are full of its products. Professional B2B is a different job. It runs on quality, focus and a direct relationship with resellers and key accounts, not stack-and-rack retail. So the company started building a food sprayer. In 1999 the food range gained its first food-grade certification from the Cantonal Laboratory of Zurich.

Early sales went mainly into Europe through a few large partners: Schneider under its Alexo brand, and Matfer and Mallard in France under the Swiss brand. The business grew through the 2000s. In 2012 new ownership took over, saw how far paint and textile had fallen, and put the whole company behind food. The reasoning was simple. You can move almost any business to another country, but the last stage of food preparation is always local. That is the business we run today, faster and easier finishing for professionals, built around semi-automatic handheld and desktop tools.

Over the years the OEM list grew. Retigo, a convection-oven maker with strong share in Eastern Europe, sells the sprayer to its oven customers. Unilever had its own combi-phase sprayer built by us, to put butter fat onto schnitzel. Both point the same way, the move from frying to baking in convection ovens. It is healthier, but there is a catch. Once you stop putting food into oil, you have to put oil onto food, and that needs an application tool. That is what the KREA food sprayer gives to companies whose core business is ovens or ingredients, not food prep.

We also work with suppliers like Mallet Oils in the US, some of whom we cannot name, who use the KREA sprayer as the way to sell their own product. Others, like Pavoni with the W100, or Hendi, brand it as their own and sell it their way.

For most of its life KREA sold only through resellers and OEM partners, trusting them to reach every market. We learned that most companies farm rather than hunt. Whole countries went unserved, and buyers told us their local reseller did not carry the product. So we built the KREA brand, with its own bundles and website, for direct sales to the B2B customers our partners were not reaching. The KREA brand sells only to B2B end customers. It does not use resellers or OEM. That keeps the two models clean, one through partners, one direct.

We like working with resellers who keep pushing, Schneider among them, always refreshing their range. KREA has innovated its way out of two dying industries before. Over the last few years it has been building several disruptive technologies, rolling out from late 2026. Schneider, with a 50-year jubilee coming, wants to develop some of them with us. There are eight or nine products in the pipeline over the next two years, among them an automatic desktop chocolate tempering system and a battery sprayer.