Razor-sharp business acumen: Bergisch company in its 5th generation – sustainable and innovative for almost 160 years

With almost 160 years of experience, Winterhoff Picard is one of Remscheid’s great traditional companies. A company that impresses with the quality and reliability of its work and responds to the changing demands of the market in a joint dialog with its customers. How does such a success story succeed? Let’s take a look back and into the future of the company.

All signs pointed to growth
In 1991, the company was still based in Hasten and had just seven employees. Clever decisions were soon to change that. Initially, the company continued to produce new blade types, demonstrating its innovative spirit with increasingly complex cutting edge geometries and conquering more and more applications, customers and markets. As early as 1997, the workforce consisted of 15 employees and included state-of-the-art machinery. In the same year, an important milestone was reached with the takeover of Picard. In the course of this integration, the company was renamed and positioned more strongly in the market as a producer of special knives. In this context, Winterhoff Picard also moved to its current location on Wüstenhagener Straße.

Focusing on women’s power early on
The company also proved that it was ahead of its time in the mid-1980s when it chose its long-standing manager: Dagmar Hüttebräucker and her husband Ralf Hüttebräucker took over an industrial company when she was just in her early 20s and a young woman in a male-dominated industry. “When my grandfather asked me around 40 years ago if I would like to take over the company, I could never have imagined how far we would have come,” recalls Dagmar Hüttebräucker.

Investing for the future
Since the end of the 1990s, Winterhoff Picard has been continuously investing in new, modern machines to meet the particularly high demands that customers place on its products. The company has now firmly established itself as a partner to demanding markets such as the food, pharmaceutical, paper and recycling industries. From ultra-modern machine knives for serrated cutting on food packaging to shredding plastics and industrial waste, the long-established Remscheid-based company covers an enormous range of applications. To ensure that this remains the case, Winterhoff Picard not only invests in new machines and systems, but also offers apprenticeships with prospects for young people from the Bergisches Land region.

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