Company Establishment in Berlin
 Hans Hoffmann with his staff in front of acondensed milk dryer in 1936 |
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| Hans Hoffmann was
26 years old when he founded his own company, the Hans Hoffmann Company, in the
southeast part of Berlin in April 1st, 1925. Before doing so, he had worked in the
Rhineland area and in Berlin as a building fitter and as a decoration blacksmith for
several years. He also taught technical drawing in the Berlin Meisterschule.
Hans Hoffmann had already acquired far-reaching experience with the construction of drying ovens in his father's company, established during the industrial foundation years in Berlin. In 1893, Gustav Hoffmann was the first to manufacture ovens made of sheet metal and rod iron– until then only stone ovens were available. Around the turn of the century, the Gustav Hoffmann Company expanded to a substantially large size, growing up with the developing industries in Berlin (Siemens, AEG, Borsig). The older Hoffmann brothers, Gustav and Fritz, took over the father's company and signed a special agreement with Hans Hoffmann, designed to avoid direct competition. Hans Hoffmann kept his promise and only began manufacturing the first oven systems developed by his father after the Gustav Hoffmann Company had been sold to the competitor Ruhland Company in the late 1920s. He made the best of the difficult market situation and began production practically anything the market requested: technical appliances for chemical plants, water plants and cable factories, loading platforms for the German Post (OLEX) and a potato flake machine, which was delivered to Russia in 1935. |
 The first company addresses: Gitschiner Straße (above, in the 1950s) and the Wasserstraße (below) 
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