Here at Pitco we take pride in providing you with high quality fryers, rethermalizers, and pasta cookers for all of your food service needs. We take pride in our state of the art Integrated Oil Management technology to help take the restaurant industry to a more efficient tomorrow. Pitco, a Middleby Company, was founded in 1918 by J.C. Pitman. Mission In 1918, our goal was to offer a simple, reliable piece of kitchen machinery for professional frying. For close to 100 years, Pitco has designed equipment that makes it easier for our customers to offer the best in fried foods. Pitco has been an industry leader in design, research, and delivering new ideas for frying. Much of our passion for frying started way back at the foundation of our company with an idea and a goal to become the largest frying manufacturer in the world, with our founder J.C. Pitman. Here's an excerpt from an inter-office memo from January 14th, 1946: "In 1918 J. C. Pitman and Sons Hotel & Restaurant Equipment Manufacturers, while attempting to work out a more satisfactory method of frying, made some important discoveries. One was that if the small particles of food which ordinarily settled to the bottom of the French Fry pot (where they collected and burned) could be kept away from the intense heat of that part of the kettle, the quality of fried food could be greatly improved. The Pitco Frialator was invented on this basic principle - - and patented. This brought about a complete change in the method of deep fat frying. The fat medium was heated by tubes running through the center of the fat container. This construction permitted all sediment from the food being fried to drip below the heating tubes into a cool zone where it could not carbonize and break down the frying fat." His complete statement can be found at http://pitco.com/pitco_history.html