Welbilt, Inc. operates as a commercial foodservice equipment company worldwide.
The company leverages a full suite of equipment capable of storing, cooking, holding, displaying, dispensing and serving in both hot and cold foodservice categories.
The company designs, manufactures and supplies best-in-class equipment for the global commercial foodservice market, which is used by commercial and institutional foodservice operators, including full-service restaurants, quick-service restaurant (QSR)...
Welbilt, Inc. operates as a commercial foodservice equipment company worldwide.
The company leverages a full suite of equipment capable of storing, cooking, holding, displaying, dispensing and serving in both hot and cold foodservice categories.
The company designs, manufactures and supplies best-in-class equipment for the global commercial foodservice market, which is used by commercial and institutional foodservice operators, including full-service restaurants, quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains, hotels, resorts, cruise ships, caterers, supermarkets, convenience stores, hospitals, schools and other institutions. The company sells its products in each of its geographical segments, the Americas, EMEA and APAC, through a global network of over 5,000 distributors, dealers, buying groups and manufacturers' representatives (individually and collectively, ‘channel partners’).
The company’s portfolio of product brands includes Cleveland, Convotherm, Crem, Delfield, Frymaster, Garland, Kolpak, Lincoln, Manitowoc Ice, Merco, Merrychef, and Multiplex. These product brands are supported by three service brands: FitKitchen, its fully-integrated kitchen systems business; KitchenConnect, the company’s digital cloud-based application offering; and KitchenCare, the company’s aftermarket parts and service business. Through these operations, the company provides its customers with a full portfolio of products, platforms and solutions specific to meet the company’s customers' needs, drive brand loyalty and maintain high customer satisfaction. With the company’s in-house culinary staff and skilled engineers, it is also able to develop innovative solutions and tailor the company’s product offerings to support its customers’ evolving menu choices and strategic plans, which serves to further strengthen the company’s customer relationships.
Markets
The company’s global footprint positions it to capitalize on growth in both developed and emerging markets, as the company’s full-line of hot and cold foodservice products, systems and services are sold in more than 100 countries.
The company manages its business in three geographic business segments: Americas, EMEA and APAC. The Americas segment includes the United States (U.S.), Canada and Latin America. The EMEA segment consists of markets in Europe, including Middle East, Russia, Africa, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The APAC segment consists primarily of markets in China, India, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Vietnam.
Strategy
The company intends to grow sales organically with its best-in-class foodservice equipment portfolio of products and an integrated kitchen solution approach.
The company seeks to identify, analyze and assess potential targets for acquisitions and partnerships to establish a presence in new markets, supplement its product offerings or acquire technologies that can be leveraged in its existing product portfolio.
Product and Service Portfolio
The company serves its customers using a complementary portfolio of brands integrated under one company. The company’s commercial foodservice equipment capabilities span storing, cooking, holding, displaying, dispensing and serving technologies. The breadth of its portfolio allows the company to meet the needs of entire commercial kitchens and serve the world’s growing demand for food prepared away from home, including the recent growth in ‘ghost kitchens’, which are professional cooking facilities created for the preparation of delivery-only meals, which have enabled restaurants to rapidly initiate food delivery services to their customers.
The company’s foodservice equipment brands include the following within each of its product categories:
Storing: The company designs, manufactures and sells commercial upright and undercounter refrigerators and freezers, blast freezers, blast chillers and cook-chill systems under the Delfield brand name. The company manufactures modular and fully assembled walk-in refrigerators, coolers and freezers, and prefabricated cooler and freezer panels for use in the construction of refrigerated storage rooms and environmental systems under the Kolpak brand name.
Cooking: The company sells traditional ovens, combination ovens, convection ovens, conveyor ovens, rapid-cooking ovens, range and grill products under the Convotherm, Garland, Lincoln, Merrychef and other brand names. The company markets fryers and frying systems principally under the Frymaster brand name, and its steam equipment under the Cleveland brand.
Holding and Displaying: The company designs, manufactures and sells a range of cafeteria and buffet equipment stations, bins, boxes, warming cabinets, warmers, display and deli cases, and insulated and refrigerated salad and food bars. The company markets its equipment stations, cases, food bars and food serving lines under the Delfield, Merco and other brand names.
Dispensing and Serving: The company produces beverage dispensers, blended ice machines, ice/beverage dispensers, beer coolers, post-mix dispensing valves, backroom equipment and support system components and related equipment for use by QSR chains, convenience stores, bottling operations, movie theaters, the soft-drink industry and others. The company designs, manufactures and sells ice machines under the Manitowoc and other brand names. The company sells its coffee equipment under the Crem brand name and other beverage-related products under the Multiplex and Manitowoc brand names.
The company’s foodservice equipment brands are augmented through the following cross-portfolio service offerings:
FitKitchen: The company produces kitchen systems and solutions for its chain customers that optimize the use of its customers' kitchen space through the introduction and benefits of its portfolio of brands, products and technologies. The intention of FitKitchen is to provide customized solutions that reduces the kitchen footprint and right-sizes equipment.
KitchenConnect: The company’s KitchenConnect enabled products include the option for data output monitoring intended to facilitate menu management by the equipment operators through the interaction of menus and equipment. These products produce an operator experience that allows for a collaborative and agile service supported by just-in-time maintenance. This reduces downtime, optimizes energy use and improves service response time.
KitchenCare: The company provides a broad range of services and after-market parts and manages a comprehensive factory-authorized service network, assuring proper installation and start-up, preventative maintenance, after-market parts supply and maximum equipment operating time on all of its products.
The company’s focus is centered on establishing a best-in-class connected operator experience through an industry-leading digitally connected offering. Key products related to this strategy include:
Digitalization and Connectivity
KitchenConnect 3.0 - The company’s open-cloud solution for the commercial food service industry provides an overview of the operator's menu, products cooked, product peak demand hours, product utilization, and product maintenance diagnostics, which improves operator efficiency, reduces equipment downtime, and enhances food quality through real-time operator data visualization. The company frequently adds new functionality and capabilities to KitchenConnect based on user needs and experience as the company focuses on continuous improvement to the digital experience of its equipment.
Common Controller Platform - Making ‘Born Digital’ the new standard for the company’s products, out Common Controller Platform provides a common user interface to control equipment in a consistent manner across each of its equipment offerings, providing for operator level ease-of-use and reduced workforce training requirements. The Common Controller Platform also establishes connectivity to KitchenConnect, and the customer's broader systems infrastructure. This enhances the company’s equipment as one of the easiest to use in the commercial foodservice industry. The use of a single user interface device across all brands leverages its combined volume across all brands and reduces the number of suppliers required.
KitchenConnect Virtual Oil Quality Sensor - Virtual oil quality sensor is based in artificial intelligence and designed to create a predictive model used to monitor the quality of the cooking oil in the company’s equipment and advise operators when to discard the oil, eliminating the ‘discard dilemma’, resulting in improved food quality and customer satisfaction. This technology replaces conventional oil sensing hardware that is often prone to failure resulting in increased downtime.
Additional key products and product upgrades introduced during 2021 include:
Garland XHP Broiler – XHP (Extra High Performance) is a new heavy-duty countertop broiler platform that uses patented Synergy technology. The XHP Broiler is revolutionizing the industry with its high power and low-energy consumption design, enabling customers to prepare (meat, fish and vegetables) faster while using as much as 50% less gas than a traditional charbroiler. With a novel gas burner and heat dispersal system in which air is mixed with gas, ignited and vortexed under the food-delivering even ultra high heat output. Intensity of the heat causes cooking byproducts to vaporize, giving the food more flavor and significantly reducing the need for daily cleaning.
Convotherm Maxx Pro – Building on the successful launch of Convothem Maxx in 2020, Maxx Pro introduces new technology into Convotherm’s leading countertop portfolio. The new Maxx Pro retains the premium cooking performance and feature mix of Convotherm Maxx, but additionally includes LED cooking chamber lighting, a triple glazed low energy glass door and a new 10 inches Welbilt Common Controller.
Manitowoc Galileo – This CrystalCraft Premier undercounter ice machine produces clear individually formed 1.5 inches ice cubes, designed to melt slowly for use specifically with whiskeys and hand-crafted premium cocktails. The product was named a 2021 Kitchen Innovations Award winner by the National Restaurant Association.
Delfield SMART – Delfield’s new smart range of equipment is intended to provide improved customer solutions for front-of-house serving lines in various market segment, including schools, colleges and universities, casinos, business and industry, and healthcare. In order to bring this to market faster, different parts of the portfolio will be brought to market over time, including enhanced Flexishield, FlexiWell Gen2, increased induction offerings, AutoFill options, FlexiTop, beverage coolers and ozone sanitization.
Lincoln 2424 – The new 2424 is the first in a new family of premium gas/electric conveyor impinger ovens from Lincoln. This touchscreen-controlled compact unit features class high culinary performance, ease of use, reliability, cleaning and serviceability features. The 2424 is the midsize model within what the company expects will be a new and expanded product offer planned to be launched in the coming years.
Garland DSG2 – The new DSG2 is a based on the Garland Double-Sided-Grill. The DSG2 includes ‘Active Compression’, the new Welbilt 7 inches Common Controller and improved in-field product reliability. Active compression is a new feature allowing the recipe (stored on the controller) to precisely manage the evenness and the amount of compression applied to the food during cooking, thus providing reduced cook times and improved food quality.
Merco Flow-Thru Order Pickup Locker - The new OrderHQ series of foodservice lockers addresses the company’s customer’s biggest order pickup challenges by reducing employee labor, giving customers a fast, contactless experience, and providing new data to optimize order pickup processes.
FilterQuick 120 - The product was named a 2021 Kitchen Innovations Award winner by the National Restaurant Association. Automatic filtration fryers have been commonly used with freezer-to-fryer products that produce significantly less sediment. The heavy wet sediment that is inherent when cooking bone-in chicken was dependent on a manual filtration process. Using multiple return ports to direct the flushing of sediment, Frymaster created a large frypot capable of automatically filtering heavy sediment. Additionally, the FilterQuick 120 leveraged the capabilities of the company’s touchscreen controller and automatic internet connection to simplify fryer operations.
Engineering, Research and Development
The company incurred total engineering costs of $49.5 million during the year ended December 31, 2021, which included research and development costs of $42.5 million.
Customers and Distribution Channels
The company’s end customer base consists of a wide variety of foodservice providers, including full-service restaurants, QSRs, hotels, resorts, cruise ships, convenience stores, retail stores, supermarkets, leisure and convention facilities, healthcare facilities, schools and universities and many other foodservice outlets (collectively ‘end customers’). The company’s end customers range from large, multinational chain operators to independently owned establishments.
The company distributes its products through a variety of distribution channels. The company’s distribution network includes an expansive network of channel partners located in over 100 countries worldwide. In addition, the company sells original equipment manufacturer replacement parts through factory authorized service providers.
Intellectual Property
The company holds numerous patents pertaining to its products and has applications pending for additional patents in the United States and various foreign countries.
Seasonality
Typically, the first quarter of the company’s fiscal year (year ended December 2021) represents the least favorable period for its financial results while the third quarter of its fiscal year typically is the most favorable. The company’s customers are primarily located in the northern hemisphere, where the warmer summer weather generally leads to increased levels of construction and remodeling within the foodservice industry.
Regulatory and Trade Environment
The company is an active member of the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers; the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute; the Underwriters Laboratories task group; the National Sanitation Foundation's International Joint Committee; the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers; various working groups responsible for European safety standards in Europe; the Industrial Association for House, Heating and Kitchen Technology; and other regional standards organizations.
The company fully engages with the U.S. Department of Energy on new energy standards, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on ENERGY STAR programs, and the Significant New Alternatives Policy program related to alternative refrigerant regulations, as well as the European Union's (EU) Ecodesign directive consultant organizations.
History
The company was founded in 1864. It was incorporated in Delaware in 2015. The company was formerly known as Manitowoc Foodservice, Inc. and changed its name to Welbilt, Inc. in 2017.
The Analyst Price Target shows the analysts’ low, high, and average target at a glance.
