January/February 1990
This equipment manufacturer recently invited its customers to tour its renovated shops and learn about the company’s first 100 years.
One hundred years ago the company that would later be called Galland Henning Nopak was incorporated. Many other firms of that era have long since ceased operations, but that manufacturing company is still in business today, having been owned and managed by the same family throughout the century.
Hermann Nunnemacher, Galland Henning Nopak's chairman of the board and grandson of the firm's founder, recently hosted a century anniversary celebration at the company's Milwaukee headquarters. There, attendees had the opportunity to walk through the newly renovated manufacturing shop where Galland Henning balers, briquetters, cast breakers, and densifiers are made for the scrap industry and Nopak disc air control valves and cylinders are produced for various equipment types, including Galland Henning scrap processing machinery.
While these two lines--scrap processing equipment and valves and cylinders--are the company is mainstay today, it began as a manufacturer of malting drums and kiln turning machines for the beer brewing industry. During the prohibition of 1920-1933, the firm was forced to diversify. Since it couldn't make brewery equipment, it tried manufacturing other products, including rock crushers, cider presses, pomace dryers, rotary gravel screens, concrete mixers, structural steel rollers, hydraulic pipe benders, and metal balers--but only the last one became a successful product.
Galland Henning returned to its brewery equipment production following prohibition and the depression, but continued to develop its balers, which became the company's major post-World-War-II machinery. Since that war, the manufacturer has made a profit every year and has been debt-free, giving it good reason to celebrate.•
This equipment manufacturer recently invited its customers to tour its renovated shops and learn about the company’s first 100 years.