Imagine yourself at a summer picnic. Slow-roasted shredded pork basted with your favorite barbecue sauce is served up sandwich-style. There’s a colorful garden salad with thinly sliced radishes, bright strips of carrots, shredded cheese, and bacon crumbled over the top. At the other end of the table, kids are devouring peanut butter sandwiches and crunchy ridged potato chips. A toddler enjoys a sweet pea puree.
Ever wonder how most of these popular foods end up on your dinner table? It’s very likely that they got there with the help of an Urschel cutting machine, with knives that passed through an Ipsen furnace.
It All Started with Gooseberries
In 1908, inventor William Urschel filed his first patent for a Gooseberry Snipper. This device allowed him and his wife Ruth to remove the stems and flowers from the popular currant-like fruit at a pace that was comparable to 100 workers. The couple would sell gallon tins of gooseberries door-to-door with a horse-drawn cart before William started seeing a market for his invention. From a home workshop, the Urschels started manufacturing “The Little Gem,” and by 1910, “The Urschel Gooseberry Snipper Factory” opened in Valparaiso, Indiana.
In the decades to come, Urschel looked for more inventions that could address the demands of popular foods. Many incredible patents followed, including a machine that produced Eskimo Pies, processed ground beef and shredded pork, cut pickles along different axes, and made crinkle-cut French fries.
Family, Innovation, and the Supermarket
The Urschel family stayed involved, too. Second generation Joe and Gerald took over in the 1930s, followed by their children Dan, Bob and Elena in the 1970s. The tools Urschel brought to market sparked a renaissance at the grocery store. Their culture of innovation helped food companies deliver fresher, more visually appealing products and inspired greater creativity across categories. Iceberg lettuce gave way to bagged salads full of vibrant vegetables. Potato chips gained ridges to hold spices and boost flavor. Peanut butter evolved from chunky to smooth, with similar techniques expanding into hazelnut, almond, and cashew spreads. Supermarkets responded with brighter aisles, broader assortments, and a wave of new options—making both fresh foods and shelf-stable staples more complex, flavorful, and appealing.
Urschel and Ipsen
Every order that Urschel receives for a new machine worldwide is manufactured at their Chesterton, Indiana plant. Gleaming stainless-steel machines mounted on wheeled carts line their brightly lit showroom.
On the factory floor, machining and assembly departments are hard at work, knocking out punch lists to work through the backlog. Among those workers is Scott Carr, Urschel’s Heat Treat Department Lead. Almost every cutting tool in every machine will pass through his department up to four times. Ipsen furnaces have been a part of that process since 1986.
Today, four Ipsen vacuum furnaces – two MetalMaster 2-bar furnaces and two TITAN LT6 2-bar furnaces – are running non-stop in the department. “They’ve been a huge help to us, allowing us to keep up with the demand,” Carr said. Annealing, hardening, tempering and brazing all play a part in creating these incredibly sharp, durable, and food-grade clean knives and other parts that are needed to assemble the machines that Urschel offers.
“Right now, we’re running our MetalMasters twenty-four hours a day, Monday through Thursday, with a process that operates independently between Friday and Sunday,” Carr explained. “Last year we added our second TITAN, and that’s really helped us keep up with the demand.” The parts that Carr’s team processes are mostly 300- and 400-series stainless steel, along with an increasing amount of 17-4, annealed for machining, then hardened and tempered before being sent to assembly.
A wide array of parts, including circle knives and cross-cut knives line the racks and fill the baskets in the loading zone. The Ipsen furnaces offer enough flexibility that Carr can count on them handling different recipes every day, based on their sales orders. “I like that we have something different to do every day,” Carr said.
The Future of Urschel
With over 650 employees worldwide, Urschel Laboratories delivers dozens of machines every month to customers in more than 130 countries around the world. Rick Urschel, the current CEO of Urschel Laboratories, represents the fourth generation of the Urschel family to lead the company. But the ownership of the company has grown beyond the Urschel name.
Since 2016, Urschel has become a 100 percent employee-owned company through the process of building an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Employees have a vested interest in the company, which rewards their focus on continuing the innovation that began with William and Ruth.
“It really does feel like a family here,” Carr explained. “From pizza parties when our departments hit their goals, to the annual company picnic – we just really enjoy each other here. Everyone greets you like a friend.”
The annual picnic in September is attended by employees and their families, often with as many as 1,400 people in attendance. It’s a safe bet to say that their picnic tables have a pretty great spread.
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